If you want lots of details about total-impact, check out the total-impact google group. That’s where we share news as it happens, post work in process, and actively ask for ideas. Unsolicited feedback and ideas are very welcome too!
We also have a twitter account where we tweet and retweet things of interest: @totalimpactdev
Want to email us? totalimpactdev@gmail.com
total-impact has come full circle: we were born out of a hackathon thrown by the Beyond Impact project, funded by the Open Society Foundations. Now we’re being generously supported from that same Beyond Impact grant, helping us move from prototype to a reliable, scaleable service.
The budget on the grant is pretty simple: £16k goes to open-source devs Cottage Labs to help build out Jean-Claude, our next release. The other £1k flew me here to Edinburgh to work with CL for a week. There are more details in our grant application; in keeping with our radical transparency philosophy, we are posting that as a gDoc here, so you can see more specifics.
It probably goes without saying that we’re really excited about this grant…it’s a great chance to work with Cottage Labs, a great vote of confidence from Beyond Impact, and a great push toward our goal of revolutionizing the dissemination and evaluation of scholarship.
Special thanks to Cameron Neylon for his vision and leadership in setting up the original workshop, for suggesting we apply for funding, and for helping us along when we did.
Here are the main libraries and other tools we’re using for Jean-Claude. Some are new for TI (Flask) some are old (Couch) and all are awesome:
This week Jason is Edinburgh working with the crackerjack devs of Cottage Labs. I’m still getting clearance to announce the details, but TI has gotten a tidy grant and Cottage Labs are getting most of it.
It’s awesome working with Cottage on this stuff. They are super skilled, great to work with, and have built their whole shop around open-source approaches to solving problems in academia. CL were the natural choice to work with, and I’ve not been disappointed.
The goal of this week-long sprint is to get get the main pieces in place for Jean-Claude, our next release (scheduled for mid-May). We’ve been at it three days now, and I’m finally getting settled in enough to start posting about it (will do better next time). Today I’ll be posting some of the stuff we’ve been whiteboarding. If you want to look at code, though, check out our new repo at https://github.com/total-impact/total-impact .
We’ve been working on an updated api spec. It is quite similar to our initial api but contains a few refinements to help us scale up.
For example, we’ll make namespaces explicit rather than implicit, so a PubMed identifier will always be referred to with a PMID prefix.
We’ve also introduced the idea of total-impact identifiers — we affectionately call them tiids.
Javascript snippets will make embedding total-impact data into webpages as easy as pie.
Have a look at the new api spec and see what you think? You can add thoughts, questions, and suggestions right on the google doc as comments.
We’ve just submitted a proposal for a $125,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. We’re really excited to work with Sloan, who have a great record of funding important projects in the advancement of knowledge and scholarship.
In keeping with our commitment to radical transparency and openness, we’re making this available via our GitHub repo.
By opening these kinds of documents, we reveal our inevitable failures and lose some strategic control over how we unveil our plans. But we gain accountability, transparency, and engagement with our community. We’re pretty excited about that.
Keep in mind that this is a living document that will likely go through some revisions before it’s (hopefully) accepted. And feel free to post any feedback to the mailing list.
(Update: we received the grant! Read all about it here.)
This is the first of what will be many sprint-report blog posts. Heather and I (Jason) have drunk deeply of the agile kool-aid, and we’re excited about working in two-week sprints; we’re also excited about documenting the results of each sprint on this blog. There’s a 15-minute cap on writing these posts, though, so…don’t expect Shakespeare (that’s like a 20-minute job for sure).
The theme of this sprint was getting TI ready for a pretty major rewrite aimed at improving the documentation, API and making it easier for open-source contributors to, well, contribute. This’ll b a pretty big deal; we’re going to be working with some external devs (more on that when we’ve got official news, but it looks like there will be some funding) and it’s important to have TI in a place where it’s easy for them to contribute.
With Jason travelling most of the time and fighting food poisoning the rest of the time, Heather had to come up big. Luckily that’s the only way to come up that Heather knows. She wrote some great spec and user stories, and moved issues from the GitHub tracker into our new backlog spreadsheet. We both worked on submitting a grant application (more on that later).
Overall, we’re both pretty happy with how the sprint system is working, although it’s going to be nicer when we’re actually shipping code at the end instead of spec.
This next sprint is built around more preparation for an epic one after that, where we hope to actually get much of the rewrite done. For now, Heather will be doing more documentation, particularly of the all-important plugins that get external data into the system, while I’ll be working on my Python skills as well as getting comfortable with libraries we’ll be using.
From the total-impact vaults, The Birth Of TI: Jason, Cristhian, and Heather after 24hrs hacking at Beyond Impact back in May 2011.
Heather and I (Jason) have been working pretty much nonstop on total-impact since Thursday, first at her place in Vancouver, and for the last two days in between meetings and meals with the super-smart folks behind Eigenfactor and SSRN here in Seattle. We’ve got a few things to report.
First, we’ve reorganized our planning infrastructure to make it simpler, more agile, and more responsive to the community. If you want to add a feature, drop it in the requests gDoc. Done. We’ve also ditched all the roadmap docs in favor of a single, prioritized product backlog in this gSpreadsheet, and we’re going to be using this blog regularly to supplement our mailing list.
Second, we’re finishing up writing spec for our next release, Jean-Claude (yep, that one. Our name sounds like an action flick; why fight it). Our goal is to have, after six two-week sprints, a total-impact web app with the same functions it does now, but built on its own API, scaleable to tens of thousands of calls per day. We’re also re-writing the PHP bits in Python, to take better advantage of the large and growing community of scientist Pythonistas.