Public Lab Research note


Web Working Group Update 22: June 2018

by warren | June 08, 2018 16:19 08 Jun 16:19 | #16455 | #16455

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:

Upcoming projects

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:

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!


3 Comments


Awesome, looking forward to starting our Rails Girls Summer of Code!

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Nice quarter everyone

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