Demodam, Signalen and we’re hiring! May 2021 newsletter
Hi and welcome to the May 2021 Foundation for Public Code newsletter.
Highlights from May
We’re all quite excited about these:
- We’ve started supporting Demodam, a website for a fictional municipality to showcase reusable digital services and components, developed by the Dutch municipal open source community Common Ground - keep an eye out for more Demodam developments!
- In our 5th Let’s Talk About Public Code podcast episode, we spoke with Amy van Someren from the municipality ‘s-Hertogenbosch. We discussed their positive experience as the first reusers of the Signalen codebase.
- We’re recruiting a storyteller/communications editor, to help us better explain why public code matters to a wider range of people. Please share with your networks!
Upcoming events
- 10 June: Based on the success of our first Standard backlog pruning call in May, we’ll host this regularly on the 2nd Thursday of the month
- 17 June: Join our regular Foundation for Public Code community call. Please help us pick the topic - what would you most like to talk about with us?
- 17-18 June: Our president Ben Cerveny will be speaking at Open Source Lisbon (Portugal)
- June 23-30: Our codebase steward Jan Ainali (@Jan_Ainali) will host the rotation curated Twitter account @imakefoss
- 28 June-2 July: Jan will also be speaking at the Open Source Summit, 2021, hosted by the Open Source Club of Saintgits College of Engineering (India)
Codebase stewardship news
Our codebase stewardship team is really enjoying their work at the moment. As a reminder, the codebases we steward are OpenZaak, Signalen, Digital Omgevingsbeleid and (now!) Demodam.
OpenZaak experienced 2 milestones this month:
- new release 1.4.0
- helpful blogpost on a potential vulnerability that didn’t affect the codebase
The Signalen community is maturing and growing:
- Amy van Someren held a demo session for 25 enthusiastic people from 2 municipalities
- with steady work together to develop a common roadmap that’s ready to be shared publicly next month. It’s a joy to see community members working together to identify overlaps in priorities
- Signalen was a featured case study for Dutch municipalities, including a short video overview (in Dutch)
Since Digital Omgevingsbeleid was put into public repositories last month, we’ve started actively stewarding the codebase - focusing especially on tests.
There are 2 codebases currently in assessment: OpenZaakBrug and Demodam. Codebase stewards also met with teams from 2 other codebases this month.
We’ve started to interview policy experts on how to make the Standard more useful for them - if you know someone we should speak with, please point them our way!
Other news
Putting our open source principles into practice, we switched our newsletter sign up form from Google to Odoo.
In case you missed it
- Our codebase steward Jan blogged about how to improve collaboration in open source codebases based on his experience with Signalen. (Scroll down for the English version!)
- Notes from our May Standard for Public Code community call on vendor and platform independence
- Notes from our May Standard backlog pruning session
- Video of our May Foundation for Public Code call on expanding the impact of our stewardship practice
- For Swedish speakers, Jan joined the Trevlig Mjukvara podcast to give an introduction to public code