Hello, all! The past few months has been dominated by our twin Summer of Code (SoC) programs and the 11 fellows working with us in these programs. A vast amount of work was completed, at times outstripping staff ability to keep up with the changes! 😝

(above, a screenshot from a visualization of our community's work, via http://ghv.artzub.com/)

Overall, several major projects which had previously seemed out of reach are now either complete or nearing completion (i.e. in final testing).

Community growth

Although less staff time was spent onboarding newcomers, SoC participants spent significant time onboarding newcomers, demonstrating great leadership and spreading out this task among more people. We now have 218 contributors on our core project plots2, up from 194 last quarter, or a 12% increase.

Summer of Code programs

Rails Girls Summer of Code (#rgsoc) will continue through the end of September and has seen excellent and deep work on our API, now pivoting to a long desired overhaul of our search systems. Google Summer of Code (#gsoc) wrapped up in mid-August with a 100% success rate, proving that a 9-project summer is feasible when students are well prepared to provide mutual support and take leadership roles in the community. 🎉 😄

Infrastructure

In the last quarter we made substantial progress with performance monitoring, standardization, and security updates, as part of our ongoing and very positive working relationship with our systems administrator, Sebastian Silva (@icarito).

Projects completed or almost complete

As of this summer, we have now completed or are actively working to address 5 of the 7 most important projects as prioritized by staff at the mid-summer staff retreat. Among others, here is a list of highlights of completed work this quarter:

• Reply by email system by @namangupta
• Rails 5.2 upgrade by @souravirus (following 4.1, 4.2, 5.0, and 5.1!)
• Daily/weekly digest system by @vidit
• Emoji commenting systems by @vidit
• Emoji/tag/username autocompletion by @cheneyshreve, @vidit, with support from @milaaraujo and @stefannibrasil
• Login with Google/Facebook/Twitter ID by @bansal_sidharth2996
• Reply by tweet prototype by @namangupta (fixed!)
  
• Combined Leaflet Environmental Layers project by @sagarpreet
• Comment spam moderation system by @gauravano

You can find links to read more about some of these in the last WWG report, or in the GSoC wrap-up post I put up last week.

Upcoming projects

• Overhaul search systems by @milaaraujo and @stefannibrasil (as part of their API project in #rgsoc)
• Major user interface (UI) design work on /welcome, /events, /methods, /people, /tags, /questions, /profile, /dashboard, and other pages as part of our UI overhaul series
• Data upload/graphing/analysis: csv, processing tools & kits integration (this was delayed due to major Summer of Code project work, but we're interested to pick it back up now that the dust is settling!)
• Project management features: completable tasks, checklists, break-me-up systems (seeing slow but steady progress)

Long-term priorities in planning stage

• Additional translation/internationalization work

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