Summer time consistently fires up my thoughts about Open Collectives. The idea of this blog was to complement GitHub Releases with a bit of background story, make the project a bit more accessible. The time and energy has been severely lacking last year to maintain visibility on all platforms, sorry about that. There is also currently no dedicated social media presence, since our Twitter feed went quiet, but we are active on Mastodon: check the #dribdat hashtag for sporadic posts. Nevertheless, here we are, counting our stripes as the summer heats up.
This does, however, not mean at all the project has not been active. The reality is that we have been running many hackathons! Almost at a weekly rate during the past months, deploying honeycombs left and right. You can find stories on the Opendata.ch and Datalets.ch blog. Here is what is happening in the Dribdat project at the moment.
Lights, camera, action! (Screenshot from Blender)
We just made a fresh drop this week: release v0.8.2, with features in the area of Data Protection and Gamification. The previous releases have made a number of revamps to the editing and posting experience. We now have a cleaner, and we feel more readable interface for people sharing their project results:
The Backboard project has been coming along too, with loads of new options and toggles. It's maturing to the point that we are seriously starting to think about replacing our frontend with this new user experience and modern frameworks:
While we have been benefiting from the support of a number of great organizations to fund such development efforts, there remains still a huge gap that we aim to fill over the summer months: there is no website where you can order a Dribdat instance with a couple of clicks. A new company and datacenter deal for "cloud native" services, should help us get there over the summer. A Docker image has been in beta testing for a year, so feel free to give it a Pull - or leave your comments on the GitHub issue tracker. If all of this is over your head, check out our latest introductory presentation for Dribdat newbies:
To complement all this activity and test the impact of hackathons, we have started a research project led by the Bern University of Applied Sciences and University of Zürich, and a circle of partners we know and respect. We are committed to testing a number of meaningful questions around the way hackathons make a difference in people's lives and careers. We will be using Dribdat for gathering vital statistics in a privacy-ensuring way, and improving our tooling for more inclusive & diverse teams. Read up about it in our recent announcement: Hackathons Refugees Teams. Thanks very much for reading, and please get in touch if you have any questions or suggestions. We are particularly curious to hear any ideas right now in regard to the applicability of what we are doing to human rights and sustainability.
