Public Lab Research note


Web Working Group Update 17: April 2017

by warren | May 05, 2017 15:42 05 May 15:42 | #14163 | #14163

Activity on the Public Lab website codebase has been a little lower than typical, in large part due to my having been traveling for much of the past few months. You can look over this at Github Pulse, as always -- and the above "punch card" image, showing when contributions are made, is pretty neat -- see it in full here.

Summer of Code

But because of our two Summer of Code programs (see below), many new contributors have submitted contributions, and we are now up to 83 contributors vs. 54 in January. The slightly slower pace has allowed for some bigger upgrades by various contributors -- a kind of "infrastructure month," including a major code style cleanup project and a major project changing a legacy database name -- not to mention hard work by @icarito on our Solr search integration.

term

This year we applied and have been accepted to Google Summer of Code again, and as of yesterday, we're excited to welcome 5 students to the 2017 program! Read more about this here -- and note that we're seeking mentors for the summer:

https://publiclab.org/notes/warren/05-04-2017/google-summer-of-code-2017-and-a-call-for-community-mentors

We've also applied to and been accepted to Rails Girls Summer of Code, and hope to be able to work with a team of contributors in that program as well; this supports our efforts to produce better infrastructure by engaging a more diverse contributor base.

Outreach

Our ongoing work to broaden and diversify our contributor base continues, and the number of people involved in welcoming in new contributors has grown slowly. This is a great prototyping space for broader engagement strategies for Public Lab's community, and are focusing on "next step" scaffolding to encourage contributors to take leadership in recruiting others and breaking down complex projects to make them more accessible.

We recently created a kind of "onboarding" page specifically for those looking to be organizers in our software community -- reaching out to and welcoming new people. It's very rewarding work, and the larger our community, the more progress we can make!

https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/projects/4


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