PyCon/OSBridge, new internship program, & tools question
Hi, newsletter subscribers! Thanks for being interested in Changeset Consulting and my open source project management work.
I write to you from a train; I’m headed to Cleveland for PyCon North America, where I’ll co-lead the Python packaging sprint. I’ll arrive May 10th and leave early May 18th. If you’ll be there too, I hope we can chat; let me know!
I’m also planning to attend the final Open Source Bridge http://opensourcebridge.org/blog/ in Portland, Oregon, June 29, in case you’ll be there too. (Changeset is also a sponsor of this year’s OSBridge.)
Client work
Changeset (me + Laura Hampton) led the team that overhauled the Python Package Index (PyPI), funded by a Mozilla Open Source Support award https://wiki.mozilla.org/MOSS. The new site is up at https://pypi.org and I’m deeply proud of what we achieved – not just the code, but a stronger contributor community, policy decisions, and a broad publicity and consultation process to better serve the whole userbase. LWN https://lwn.net/Articles/751458/ and the Python wiki https://wiki.python.org/psf/PackagingWG have more details.
Changeset (me + Kate Chapman via Cascadia Technical Mentorship) also recently worked with the Electronic Frontier Foundation to assess and improve maintainership for HTTPS Everywhere. “Having their help has been an enormous boost of energy, helping us gain clarity on roadmapping the project and facilitating contributor / maintainer collaboration,” HTTPS Everywhere maintainer Bill Budington wrote in his farewell email to us https://lists.eff.org/pipermail/https-everywhere/2018-March/002774.html. Our work helped as HTTPS Everywhere launched a new feature to make updates faster & more frequent https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/04/https-everywhere-introduces-new-feature-continual-ruleset-updates.
And Changeset, in partnership with Open Tech Strategies https://opentechstrategies.com/, has just started working with Python scientific computing project Econ-ARK https://www.numfocus.org/project/econ-ark, which helps social scientists do structural modeling. Changeset and OTS will help overhaul the new user and developer experience for the toolkit, including Python packaging.
Grants
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The Digital Impact Alliance’s Open Source Center has a Catalytic Grant program http://www.osc.dial.community/grants.html for HFOSS projects, and in this round, they particularly want to fund UX work, privacy/responsible data improvements, and underappreciated “dirty jobs”. Apply for up to USD$25K by May 31.
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The Sloan and Ford Foundations’ Digital Infrastructure Research RFP https://ford-foundation-6.forms.fm/digital-infrastructure-research-rfp is open till June 13th. You can apply for more than USD$125K in funding. Their research question:
[they] would like to fund a set of research projects to further study these dynamics, with an eye toward better understanding the economics, maintenance and sustainability of digital infrastructure.
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GNOME has a new internship program https://www.gnome.org/news/2018/05/announcing-the-gnome-internship-program/ focusing on strategic projects. The first round seeks candidates to work on privacy/security. Applications due October 1st.
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GitHub can sponsor https://community.github.com/ events, meetups, and so on, with at least two months’ notice.
Tools
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Have any of you tried SparkleShare http://www.sparkleshare.org/, file sync and version control for groups that include designers (so, better support than plain git for image files)? I’d like to know whether to recommend it.
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I’m looking forward to Texture http://substance.io/texture/, an editor for scientific documents, gaining live collaborative editing features later this year.
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Software Freedom Conservancy not only serves as the fiscal sponsor and organizational home for Etherpad – they also provide https://sfconservancy.org/news/2017/jul/20/etherpad/ an Etherpad instance anyone can use to collaboratively edit documents.
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David Humphrey’s “What Happens when you Contribute, revisited” https://blog.humphd.org/what-happens-when-you-contribute-revisited/ categorizes the variety of possible scenarios when someone contributes to an open source project” and explains how each feels for newcomers.
Availability
Changeset is available for new engagements starting in mid-July. Reply and we can set up a free initial consultation.
And I am available for talks https://www.harihareswara.net/talks.html starting in October, and would particularly like to talk with your community about real-world release management.
Best wishes, as always.