We’re picking a tagline for TI, and we’d love to get your feedback. To help us, just visit the poll on SurveyMonkey, tick your top tagline (or suggest one of your own), and you’re done.  Finally, a chance to channel your inner Don Draper!

Heather is going to be full-time total-impact starting August 1st!

For the last two years I have been a DataONE postdoc, with discretionary time for synergistic activities like total-impact.  I went officially 50/50 when the Sloan grant started May 1st…. and have now revised that plan to be 100% total-impact starting in six weeks.  

My passion for data remains. This move is because I believe research data needs better tracking tools to be fully appreciated and useful.  It needs context.  Context around how a dataset is collected, but also context around how the dataset is received by the community and what difference it has made.  As part of our commitment to diverse research products, total-impact collects metrics on dataset discussion and reuse and makes these tracks broadly available for mashups and remixes.  We’ll be doing much more of this in the coming months.

(I would talk about how great it has been to be a DataONE postdoc, but this isn’t a goodbye post — I still have papers to finish! 🙂 )

In related and similarly-awesome news, Jason is relocating to Vancouver for August and September, for total-impact All The Time and IRL 2012.  There will be t-shirts.

These are exciting days in total-impact land:

• We’re participating (and speaking!) in StartUp Science this weekend. Check out the lineup: PeerJ! Mendeley! Academia.edu! ScienceExchange! total-Impact! OAMonday! and more. Ambitious innovative research tools are going to be game-changing for the way scientists work.
• altmetrics12 is next week! Jason has been one of the main movers and shakers in pulling together a stellar attendee group: publishers, funders, tool-builders, researchers. Follow along at #altmetrics12.
• we can barely sleep at night due to excitement about our new codebase… stay tuned or spy on our commits for teasers.

Thanks to Alert Community Member Hilmar Lapp, we found out about a contest for startups to win the World’s Smallest Office (smoffice, get it?): basically a nook in a coffee shop. Rather more enticingly, it also comes with six months of a condo in downtown Durham, which has a growing startup scene.

Jason lives and goes to school near Durham, and plus we like the kind of wacky thinking that comes up with this sort of contest so we applied.  Here’s the one-minute smoffice video, in which I sell TI from inside a boiler room, dryer, car trunk, and my fridge. 

Here’s the one-page business plan we submitted—bear in mind that in keeping with our agile approach, this is a business plan, but not the business plan. It’s certain to change, maybe quite radially, as we continue to adapt in response to user feedback and our own evolving ideas.

We find out on the 13th. Feel free to vote up our video on the smoffice Facebook page if you’re into that sort of thing.

We just heard: total-impact has been awarded $125k by the Sloan Foundation! What’s this mean for users?  By April 1, 2013, we plan to hit important milestones in three areas:

Product:

• addition of over a dozen new information sources to total-impact.org, particularly data repositories
• 60 github watchers, 20 forks
• substantial innovation in user interfaces for and visualizations of altmetric data

Use:

• 50k visits to total-impact.org, 30k unique visitors
• at least 100 scholars embedding or linking to TI reports on their CV
• at least 25 TI reports included in annual review or tenure & promotion packages
• 15 publishers/repositories embedding total-impact data on articles/datasets
• 5 in-process or published research studies based on TI data

Sustainability: A sustainable business plan and organizational model for a mission‐driven TI organization

For more detail, see the grant proposal.

We are so excited! Thanks to Josh Greenberg, program director.  You won’t regret it 🙂 As always, let us know if you’ve got thoughts or ideas on how we can best make these goals happen. Now let’s go change the world!

Total-impact has outgrown its baby teeth: we are rearchitecting the codebase.  The goal is a robust and scaleable framework that will take us through the next phase of rapid growth.

The new codebase will have a clean api, a webapp that uses the api directly, data storage at the item level, a history of metric values over time, and queues to facilitate timeliness and scalability.  It is being built from the ground up with good logging, error-handling, and documentation… aspects that aren’t always at the top of the hackathon agenda 🙂

The new codebase is written in Python rather than PHP.  This change wasn’t taken lightly: changing programming languages is a Classic Blunder after all.  That said, others have done it successfully, and Python appears to be the favourite programming language at Hacker News, so we’re confident it is the right move.

Without further ado, here are the new code repositories at GitHub.  Works in progress… stay tuned!

Total-impact will always be open-source.  It is a pretty standard OSS project in its early stages: its core developers are geographically distributed and contributions have been fueled by enthusiasm rather than paycheques.  Producing Open Source Software gives a great overview of standard processes for these sorts of projects.

At the same time, Jason and I (Heather) are sold on the principles behind agile development: iteration, adaptation, tight feedback loops, simplicity.

OSS and agile methodologies have many similarities, but some differences.  In particular, agile development is practiced most often by co-located, dedicated-coding teams.  As a result, we’ve been rolling our own process a bit.  It is working well: it feels good, we aren’t spending too much time on process, and we recognize and change things when they aren’t working.

For example: we were keeping our sprint backlog in a google spreadsheet. Last sprint we moved to tracking sprint items as GitHub issues.  Although this makes it harder to do time estimation, it is easier to integrate into our workflows… currently a win.

Here is what our development process looks like right now:

• two-week sprints.  We practice a little more flexibility in pre-determined scope than Scrum agile.
• developer conversation take place openly on the newly-formed total-impact-dev google group
• weekly Skype calls with active developers (Richard, Mark, Heather, Jason) for start/mid/end sprint conversations
• sprint issues in GitHub
• product backlog in a google spreadsheet