It's my pleasure to make a number of announcements regarding the BigBang
project.
*Successful DMI Summer School Workshop*
A working group of roughly 12 people used BigBang to study the impact of
civil society in promoting human rights in ICANN at the Digital Methods
Initiative Summer School
<https://www.digitalmethods.net/Dmi/SummerSchool2016> this summer. Huge
thanks to Niels ten Oever, Davide Beraldo, and DATACTIVE
<https://data-activism.net/> for their hard work and support in making this
happen.
The hard work for this workshop happened on Niels' BigBang fork. Check it
out!
https://github.com/nllz/bigbang
In addition to the opportunity to use BigBang as a tool for data science
education, this initiative was an important turning point for BigBang's
anticipated use cases and development.
*Release v0.2 "Tulip Revolution" Upcoming*
The next planned release of BigBang will be version 0.2, "Tulip
Revolution". The purpose of this release will be to consolidate
contributions made in preparation, during, and following the workshop.
*Anticipated change in governance structure and primary repository*
With the contributions of DATACTIVE, there's great promise in BigBang's
growth as a community project.
These changes will require some changes to the governance structure. Over
the course of the work towards, we will be transitioning from a "Benevolent
Dictator <http://producingoss.com/en/producingoss.html#benevolent-dictator>"
model governance model to a "Consensus Based Democracy
<http://producingoss.com/en/producingoss.html#consensus-democracy>" model.
This is to give more of the contributors ownership over the project as we
move forward.
I will be drafting community bylaws during the transition. Voting rights
will be, as is standard, tied to commit access rights.
As part of this change, the primary repository for BigBang will shift from
my personal GitHub account to the datactive organization on GitHub:
https://github.com/datactive/bigbang
*What happens next*
These changes are big. They will happen slowly over the course of the next
couple of months. As current Benevolent Dictator, I want to put the project
on the surest footing moving forward. So please stay tuned for further
announcements.
What happens next is merging together all the great work that's happened
this summer.
If you think you will have time to work on this, please let me know and
we'll work out a system for delegating tasks.
All best,
Seb