2021 has been a year of growth for Council Data Project. We went from a few core members on the team to growing to about 12 contributors working on the project in various capacities. We had our "soft launch" of v3 of the application and infrastructure and this was such a successful soft-launch that we (the core team) now already have multiple instances of CDP up-and-running simply because of how easy it is to develop and maintain. We additionally wrote and published a paper in the Journal of Open Source Software: Council Data Project: Software for Municipal Data Collection, Analysis, and Publication
We plan on having our full launch of v3 soon with the addition of some missing features, bug fixes, and design cleanup!
Crucial to Open Collective: 2021 was the first time we received external funding for our work! Funding from Code for Science & Society and the Digital Infrastructure Incubator allowed us to spend some time focused on project governance, and, how to sustain the project long term.
The incubator is still ongoing, but we are already seeing positive change. We were hoping to develop a framework and understanding for giving project contributors more ownership over parts of the project and we have seen this start to happen with our "feature-crews." Each feature-crew has a few members (product manager, frontend dev, backend dev, etc.) that are all interested in working on the same feature rather than each of us working on some general tasks.
This has given us a method for more directly targetting areas of the project that need help, this has helped us organize our own needs and wishes, and this has helped the contributors both with finding ownership of their own parts of the project, but additionally, finding a part of the project they find most enjoyable to work on.
In 2022 we plan on publishing all of our notes and ideas we have taken away from the Digital Infrastructure Incubator into a collection of documents that we think other civic technology projects may find useful and to serve as a reference for ourselves in the future.
For the project as a whole, these feature-crews and a rough roadmap of things we are thinking about in 2022 can be seen here: These feature names may be a bit vague so if you are curious at all, please feel free to reach out with questions.
