With Open Humans we are not only working to empower you to decide with whom to share your personal data – but also to explore your own data. With our latest project addition – the Personal Data Notebooks – we are taking a further step in that direction. Based on the increasingly popular Jupyter Notebooks they bring together data analysis code, documentation and data visualization. With the added twist that the Personal Data Notebooks also easily provide simple and private access to your personal data that is stored in Open Humans. Which not only makes it easy to write and use a data analysis – it also makes it easy to share your results without having to share your personal data with someone else. That way you can not only learn about yourself and your data, but also about how data analyses are performed.

If you want to write your own data analysis for the notebooks from scratch you can get started in Python, R or Julia. Or if you want to tweak or run existing data analysis you can use and adapt existing notebooks. In the simplest case you don’t even have to write/edit any code, as the input data are standardized according to their Open Humans data source. So for example you can easily run a Fitbit analysis notebook written by someone else right away on your own Fitbit data. To get you started we have a step-by-step guide on how to use the Personal Data Notebooks, along with a set of ready-to-use data analysis notebooks for Fitbit, Apple Health, Moves, 23andMe and Twitter archive data.

But this is just the start. We can’t wait to see what kind of analysis notebooks the community will come up with. To kick off the development of additional notebooks we are running a small competition. Submit your own personal data notebooks until May 27th and our judges will select the most interesting submissions to add them to our example notebooks. For this competition Steven Jonas, Azure Dominique and Gary Wolf of QuantifiedSelf.com have agreed to be our judges! If you need an inspiration for your notebooks you can take a look at already proposed notebook ideas and discuss your ideas on Slack.

With an enormous thank you to all our candidates – and the members that voted –  I’m thrilled to share our three new members of the Board of Directors for Open Humans Foundation!

Community Seat: Dana Lewis

As the first winner of the Community Seat election, we’re thrilled to have Dana representing the interests of the Open Humans community. Dana is a pioneer in open source and health, including her leadership of the inspiring OpenAPS community and work connecting this community to research. You can read more about this – and how Dana has used Open Humans – in her post on our blog: “Why Open Humans is an essential part of my work to change the future of healthcare research”

Full vote tallies of the community election were as follows: Dana M Lewis (92), Alexander (Sasha) Wait Zaranek (60), Embriette Hyde (53), James M Turner (33), Katarzyna Wac (28), Richard Sprague (23), Chris Gorgolewski (16)

We are also thrilled to introduce two new board-elected directors!

Board-elected Seat: James Turner

James is one of the earliest and most active members of the Open Humans community, and has been profiled on our blog as well! Having joined through participation in the Personal Genome Project, James went on to create some of the first projects in our site – including an Apple Health import app that has been used in downstream academic research. In addition to his long commitment to this community, James brings valuable practical experience in managing nonprofit organizations, having created and managed his own charitable 501(c)3 for several years.

Board-elected Seat: Chris Gorgolewski

Chris is an academic in the field of neuroscience, interested in expanding the use of Open Humans among traditional researchers. Chris has promoted neurological research data sharing through his work with Neurovault, OpenNeuro, and reusable data sharing language for consent forms. Chris brings to the board a new facet of research, and an interest in promoting the use of Open Humans in studies — including the return of valuable data to participants to enable both individual access as well as re-use in new research.

Finally, I want to thank the candidates who volunteered to become members of our board. Candidates took time to communicate with us and with the community, and we are honored by the visions you shared with us. There were more excellent candidates than we had seats to fill! But there will be seats again, and we hope you continue to be part of Open Humans as some of our most brilliant members, colleagues, and advocates.