We’ve just submitted a proposal for a $125,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. We’re really excited to work with Sloan, who have a great record of funding important projects in the advancement of knowledge and scholarship.

In keeping with our commitment to radical transparency and openness, we’re making this available via our GitHub repo.

By opening these kinds of documents, we reveal our inevitable failures and lose some strategic control over how we unveil our plans. But we gain accountability, transparency, and engagement with our community. We’re pretty excited about that.

Keep in mind that this is a living document that will likely go through some revisions before it’s (hopefully) accepted. And feel free to post any feedback to the mailing list.

(Update: we received the grant! Read all about it here.)

This is the first of what will be many sprint-report blog posts. Heather and I (Jason) have drunk deeply of the agile kool-aid, and we’re excited about working in two-week sprints; we’re also excited about documenting the results of each sprint on this blog. There’s a 15-minute cap on writing these posts, though, so…don’t expect Shakespeare (that’s like a 20-minute job for sure).

The theme of this sprint was getting TI ready for a pretty major rewrite aimed at improving the documentation, API and making it easier for open-source contributors to, well, contribute. This’ll b a pretty big deal; we’re going to be working with some external devs (more on that when we’ve got official news, but it looks like there will be some funding) and it’s important to have TI in a place where it’s easy for them to contribute.

With Jason travelling most of the time and fighting food poisoning the rest of the time, Heather had to come up big. Luckily that’s the only way to come up that Heather knows. She wrote some great spec and user stories, and moved issues from the GitHub tracker into our new backlog spreadsheet. We both worked on submitting a grant application (more on that later).

Overall, we’re both pretty happy with how the sprint system is working, although it’s going to be nicer when we’re actually shipping code at the end instead of spec.

This next sprint is built around more preparation for an epic one after that, where we hope to actually get much of the rewrite done. For now, Heather will be doing more documentation, particularly of the all-important plugins that get external data into the system, while I’ll be working on my Python skills as well as getting comfortable with libraries we’ll be using.

From the total-impact vaults, The Birth Of TI: Jason, Cristhian, and Heather after 24hrs hacking at Beyond Impact back in May 2011.

Heather and I (Jason) have been working pretty much nonstop on total-impact since Thursday, first at her place in Vancouver, and for the last two days in between meetings and meals with the super-smart folks behind Eigenfactor and SSRN here in Seattle. We’ve got a few things to report. 

First, we’ve reorganized our planning infrastructure to make it simpler, more agile, and more responsive to the community. If you want to add a feature, drop it in the requests gDoc. Done. We’ve also ditched all the roadmap docs in favor of a single, prioritized product backlog in this gSpreadsheet, and we’re going to be using this blog regularly to supplement our mailing list.

Second, we’re finishing up writing spec for our next release, Jean-Claude (yep, that one. Our name sounds like an action flick; why fight it). Our goal is to have, after six two-week sprints, a total-impact web app with the same functions it does now, but built on its own API, scaleable to tens of thousands of calls per day. We’re also re-writing the PHP bits in Python, to take better advantage of the large and growing community of scientist Pythonistas.