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 this summer. Huge thanks to Niels ten Oever, Davide Beraldo, and DATACTIVE for their hard work and support in making this happen.

The hard work for this workshop happened on Niels' BigBang fork. Check it out!

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.

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.

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"  model governance model to a "Consensus Based 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:

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