July 18, 2018

Read the Docs and Tidelift, archetypes, tutorials, referrals, and more

Hi, newsletter subscribers! Thanks for being interested in Changeset Consulting and my open source project management work.

I’ll talk a little about Changeset’s client projects, then tell you about grants you can apply for and useful new tools and resources, refer you to a few other consultants you should know about, and mention Changeset’s availability for new work.

Client work

You’re getting a preview here of some blurbs I’ll be posting on changeset.nyc, and a blog post or two!

• Read the Docs gives developers easy turnkey documentation hosting (and building and versioning), free for open source projects http://readthedocs.io/ and paid for companies who want private docs https://readthedocs.com/. Changeset (in this case, me + Jason Owen) has just started assessing their current work backlog and developer/sysadmin experience. Next, we’ll streamline Read the Docs’s work processes and help them articulate and clarify the product roadmap.

• The Econ-ARK scientific computing project has a new site http://econ-ark.org/. Changeset’s working on Econ-ARK in partnership with Open Tech Strategies https://opentechstrategies.com/ to help more social scientists do structural modeling. How can we better predict how policy changes will affect different people and organizations? Changeset and OTS are helping overhaul the new user and developer experience for the toolkit, so researchers can test and share their models more easily, and make science more reproducible.

• Tidelift http://tidelift.com/ is making open source more dependable – businesses buy subscriptions to the FLOSS they use, and Tidelift funnels that money to the maintainers, who can then focus on keeping that software supported and secure. Tidelift asked me to help them better work with the Python community, and I’m happy to be paid to occasionally advise them.

Grants

July 31st is the deadline for an exciting new grant from the Digital Impact Alliance http://www.osc.dial.community/grants.html.

DIAL and the Open Source Center are excited to offer this first round of strategic grants for open source software projects serving the international development and humanitarian sectors.

For as many as 5 grant awards, DIAL anticipates providing up to $900,000 USD total and up to 480 hours total of complementary in-kind technical assistance through participation in the Open Source Center program. This award is expected to span six months of project activity, with an option to extend.

Applications Due: Tuesday, 31 July 2018 at 5:00pm EST Awards Announced: First week of August (Subject to Change)

Eligible proposals will involve one or more of the following activity categories:

• Enterprise-Level Quality Improvements
• Multi-stakeholder Collaboration
• Platform Building and Generalization
• Product Consolidation
• Managing Upstream Dependencies and Downstream Forks

More Q&A about these: https://forum.osc.dial.community/t/strategic-grants-q-a-june-2018/335

My sense is that they’re interested in helping both projects that specifically target humanitarian/international development needs (like Sahana) and upstream software that undergirds that kind of work. So, if you want to upstream Public Lab https://github.com/publiclab improvements to Leaflet, I bet that would fit.

And the Ford Foundation’s just blogged about five other organizations funding public interest technology: https://www.fordfound.org/ideas/equals-change-blog/posts/five-more-orgs-ready-to-invest-in-publicinteresttech-today/

Tools and resources

• The Teaching Tech Together handbook gives you a tested, research-based guide to teaching technological skills outside traditional classrooms. Learn how people learn, how to design and teach effective lessons, and more. CC-BY. http://teachtogether.tech/

• I wrote about why libraries.io is a component of the infrastructure of maintainer hospitality. https://www.harihareswara.net/sumana/2018/07/18/1

• The new Field Guide To Open Source Project Archetypes, written by Open Tech Strategies (one of my clients), brings patterns into focus to help us understand why different businesses, orgs, and volunteer groups do what they do. I’ve already used it to better plan a client engagement. https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2018/05/15/whats-your-open-source-strategy-here-are-10-answers/

• Run your own mail servers? EFF announces “STARTTLS Everywhere: Securing Hop-to-Hop Email Delivery”. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/06/announcing-starttls-everywhere-securing-hop-hop-email-delivery

• “As of January 1, 2020, companies around the world will have to comply with additional regulations related to processing of personal data of California residents.” Lothar Determann wrote up the new California Consumer Privacy Act, who needs to comply, and how, at the International Association of Privacy Professionals site https://iapp.org/news/a/analysis-the-california-consumer-privacy-act-of-2018/.

• Python packaging experts have just overhauled their intro packaging tutorial. “This tutorial walks you through how to package a simple Python project. It will show you how to add the necessary files and structure to create the package, how to build the package, and how to upload it to the Python Package Index.” https://packaging.python.org/tutorials/packaging-projects/

• PyPI package maintainers, please verify your account email addresses so you can keep releasing new versions to PyPI. Explanation: https://mail.python.org/mm3/archives/list/distutils-sig at python.org/message/5ER2YET54CSX4FV2VP24JA57REDDW5OI/

Referrals

• Nathaniel J. Smith has some consulting availability for the next few months. “I’d be especially interested if anyone wants to pay for work on Trio or Python async more generally (e.g. adding async support to urllib3/requests).” The kinds of things he does: https://vorpus.org/blog/a-farewell-to-the-berkeley-institute-for-data-science/

• Keffy R. M. Kehrli does podcast transcription for USD $50 per audio hour, with a ~24 hour turnaround. http://www.keffy.com/hire-me/ A pretty good deal, in my experience!

• Your small tech org, user group, or open source community could, for just USD $200, get a code of conduct evaluation, a report, and a half-hour meeting about next steps. The expert offering this service is Audrey Eschright, and given Eschright’s expertise, this is tremendous value for money, in my opinion. http://lifeofaudrey.com/2018/07/16/coc-consult.html

• Jason Owen, a DevOps specialist with strong experience as a developer, DBA, and systems administrator, is particularly interested in implementing and fixing build and continuous integration setups. In terms of languages and platforms he’s a polyglot (Java, Clojure, Groovy, Ruby, Python, JavaScript, Bash, Powershell, etc.) with strong Linux experience. https://jasonaowen.net/

Availability

Changeset is available for new engagements starting in November. Reply and we can set up a free initial consultation.

And I am available for talks https://www.harihareswara.net/talks.html starting in 2019, and would particularly like to talk with your community about real-world release management.

Best wishes, as always.