Mozfest is Mozilla ’s annual festival that brings together technologists, activists, scientists, artists and many more for a weekend in London’s Ravensbourne College. Unlike schedules of many other events, time for passive consumption of talks can barely be found. Instead, workshops make up the bulk of the schedule. And even the science fair & demo parts consist largely of lively discussions between participants.

Participating in the Mozilla Global Sprint is somewhat of an annual ritual for me. This year’s installment took place on May 10/11. As Open Humans hadn’t ever participated in a Sprint before, I spent some time in getting up a clean list of ways to contribute on a small micro-site.

“ Algorithm ” is a word that has become more and more meaningless in our day and age – given how it is thrown around everywhere. If you bring it up with people who didn’t undergo some form of tech initiation – be that formal education or self-learning - it’s easy for them to conjure a picture like the one above: A colourful mess of things, too complex to understand if you don’t have some advanced degree in computer science.

How can we make it easy to add data to Open Humans ? Open Humans lives through its community of members and the projects they design.

President Bartlet of The West Wing is calling his famous “What’s next” to his secretary after managing a task. I just defended my PhD last week, and one question from virtually every person who attended and stayed for the after-party: What’s Next? Which initially felt a bit weird. After all, I already took my next step three months ago when I joined Open Humans as the Director of Research.

Exactly 5 years ago Twitter started offering the option for users to download their full archive of personal tweets. The archive gives you a change to quickly browse through your personal history and find those funny cat pictures you once posted. But there is additional value in the archive, transcending the trips down to memory lane.

The first month in Berkeley – and with that also with Open Humans – is slowly coming to an end. And while much of this time was spent wrangling various forms of organisational and bureaucratic ordeals (finding an apartment; making sure all visa stuff is in order; getting a Social Security Number;

After having had some time to reflect on my writing process I’d like to share some of the things that I found useful during the writing of my PhD thesis. There’s probably already a million of these articles out there, but this also means that one more shouldn’t make much of a difference, so here we go. In principle this should all be applicable for other thesis writings as well.

I am more than delighted to announce that I will join Open Humans . Supported by a fellowship I will assume the role of Director of Research in November. Open Humans as a platform connects individuals who want to participate in research with research studies and projects that can be run by academic and “ citizen ” scientists alike.

Today I finally submitted my PhD thesis (🎉) and what better way to celebrate that day than doing some data analysis and visualization, right? So, let’s get some idea on how much time the actual write-up took after all and how I spent my time during these weeks. Luckily, I’m running RescueTime on my machines. The service allows you to monitor how, when and how long you’re using your computer.

Philipp and I again participated in the Mozilla Global Sprint , which took place on 1st and 2nd of July.