We've had a pretty wild month in our software contributor community. After an already busy December, a group of contributors has stepped up to really become leaders in our software collaborations -- tackling large new features, welcoming newcomers, and helping to review and support one anothers' contributions.

(This is the first Web Working Group update in a little while, because I've been writing blog posts and other smaller updates instead)

For some numbers from the past 30 days:

Excluding merges, 26 authors have pushed 147 commits. 348 files have changed and there have been 50,994 additions and 3,000 deletions.

https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/pulse/monthly (see charts below)

More outreach

We've applied to both Rails Girls Summer of Code (which we were accepted to!) and Google Summer of Code for 2018, both of which were great for us this past summer; we've also reached out to new first-timer-friendly websites like https://github.com/Roshanjossey/first-contributions/ to help get the word out that we're here and we're welcoming newcomers!

Our Community Toolbox project has also really helped -- newcomers are now welcomed to tackle projects across Public Lab coding projects, not just on PublicLab.org -- and due to all our awesome new leaders, we have a steady supply of first-timers-only issues for them to take on:

https://publiclab.github.io/community-toolbox/#r=all

More organizing

To better facilitate this fantastic growth, we've been continuing our Software Outreach blog series, this month with a post on modularity -- a key to breaking up big projects into small pieces that newcomers can tackle. Expect more on this soon -- we'll also be at LibrePlanet this March to talk about our work in this space.

Tackling design

Finally, a big area of growth is design work -- we don't have nearly the community, peer-to-peer process for interface design that we do for coding, and we're seeing a growing need for good UI/UX design that we can tackle in a similar workflow -- engaging newcomers, working in small self-contained projects, and quick iteration. To this end, we've started posting some questions to the site:

New features

There's really not enough space to list out all the new features we've seen go up this month -- dozens of them -- but I'll just mention that our new People page -- incorporating a huge amount of work on geographic features -- is now live. See screenshot below!

That's it for this month -- thanks!