This quarter has been a busy one as Summer of Code has begun, new community leaders have welcomed in a growing community to take on issues, and we've evolved better workflows to manage the increased productivity.

Community growth - We now have 194 contributors to our core project. As seen in the lead image, a given month now often has over twenty contributors, and many of these are recruited, welcomed, and supported by other community members. The combination of our first-timers-only and other software outreach strategies is really seeing success, something we were able to further promote and celebrate at #LibrePlanet this spring. This level of participation shows that we've been able to sustain our pace since the huge spike in contributors in January.

Deeper engagement - What's more, as you can see in the participation graph, many more contributors are making larger contributions, leading projects and rapidly completing them.

Summer of Code programs

This year we will again have our largest-yet Summer of Code program, with 11 fellows between RGSoC and GSoC -- our largest by far, and spanning 5 continents. Major sections of work scheduled for the summer are already complete, and we will be tackling additional projects with the extra time.

Also of note is the growth of several new chapters of the Rails Girls Summer of Code program, and especially the one in Nairobi, which was founded by an alum of our Summer of Code programs, StellaMaris Njage. We look forward to working with StellaMaris and the RG Nairobi team in welcoming even more newcomers into our community.

Infrastructure

Led by @icarito, our systems administrator, we've moved PublicLab.org entirely onto containers for greater maintainability and efficiency, a project which has been in progress for many months.

Projects completed or near complete

Among others, here is a list of highlights of completed work this year:

• Initial reply by email system by @namangupta
• Rails 5 upgrade (!) by @souravirus
• Daily/weekly digest system by @vidit
• Draft creation and sharing system by @gauravano
• An exciting series on Raspberry Pi imaging by @MaggPi

Upcoming projects

• Login with Google/Facebook/Twitter ID by @bansal_sidharth2996
• A very cool environmental mapping library by @sagarpreet
• Reply by tweet prototype
• Geographic features UI work by @mridulnagpal
• API improvements by @milaaraujo and @stefannibrasil

New big projects

The most recent staff retreat was a chance to check-in and reprioritize upcoming big projects. Those with greatest staff priority were:

• General UI work on /welcome, /events, /methods, /people, /tags, /questions, /profile, /dashboard, and other pages
• Completion/follow-up of Search project with search refinements and power features
• Project Bluestone: moving off of discussion lists: reply by email, daily/weekly digests, groups, notifications, Twitter/FB integration
• Tag and topic pages - interrelated tag graphs, tag page redesign, subscriptions UI, "pulse" view
• Data upload/graphing/analysis: csv, processing tools & kits integration
• Project management features: completable tasks, checklists, break-me-up systems

With our new capacity, several of these (Bluestone, tag/topic pages) will be addressed during this Summer of Code, while others (such as UI, data upload) we hope to address through new fundraising efforts. Others we will tackle through newcomer outreach and onboarding.

Thanks to everyone who's helped make this a great quarter for Public Lab software!