[okfn-labs] Making it easier for people to figure out what's going on in OKFN

[sheila miguez]

Thanks to the original poster. I'm enjoying this thread because I've often
wanted to understand everything that is going on with okfn. If it helps to
understand my motivations so that you get some use cases out of me:


I'm a developer who is interested in the intersection of open science,
reproducible research, open access, advocacy, education and the
intersection of these things. I'm also a hackerspace enthusiast so there is
an element of diy motivation added.

Right now I work for Victoria Stodden with her postdoc as a developer, <
http://researchcompendia.org/developers/>, on a project that pulls together
these intersecting concepts. I want to get enough user facing functionality
up so that I can focus on backend work which will include talking to a lot
of services as well as creating my own apis -- we want to do similar things
that other sites out there do, but we also want to be the continuous
integration environment (like jenkins or travis-ci!) of reproducible
research (this is not how my group would describe it, but my own framing
since I come from an industry background).

I've subscribed to many of the okfn mailing lists and what blogs I have
found with the intent of discovering projects that I can use or contribute
to. I also want to discover events and forums where people discuss things
in such a way that I can help -- which means by being a developer. I
dislike hackathons but I enjoy ongoing project nights. Project nights have
a better chance of sustaining contributor activity, in my opinion.

You all do a lot of stuff I am watching. I haven't followed everything in
your github accounts, but do check in from time to time. If you have a
portal page that lists all of the repos with short bylines and an
indication of which ones are active, retired, still supported but quiet
that would be most excellent. As a developer sometimes I want to use
something but check commit history, number of issues, amount of time pull
requests sit waiting -- these are elements that give me an idea about the
health of a project. if I see no activity, I worry about bit-rot. On the
other hand, sometimes there is no activity because the tool is extremely
simple and stable. If you have some quick descriptions and opinions on the
maturity of things, that would be a great help.

For anything that is a python project, if you have active irc times or
anyone in Chicago, I could point people in our local user group(s) to take
a look in case there is enough shared interests for you to get new
contributors. I sometimes help run events and workshops focused on
introducing new people to programming and open source projects.

So, this is all why I am following activity in the fuzzy set of okfn
mailing lists, blogs, repos, chat rooms. Sometimes I only discover things
due to a passing mention on another list -- you should definitely have a
dashboard. It would be most excellent. eleventy!






-- 
sheila
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