We’ve submitted a revision to our Sloan Foundation grant in response to comments and feedback from them, and to reflect some updated ideas we’ve had.
The biggest change is the budget. I’m close to full-time already because TI is my dissertation. But we’ve boosted Heather’s grant salary to the point where she’d only be 50% supported by her current postdoc, with the other half by the TI grant.
(Update: we received the grant! Read all about it here.)
As part of our Sloan Foundation grant process, we were asked to come up with some measurable outcomes. This ended up being a really valuable exercise, and I anticipate we’ll be checking back with these pretty regularly.
We expect not only to reach these goals by April 2013, but also that our chosen metrics will be increasing across the board. Here they are:
Of course, in keeping with our open and agile approach, we’ll likely end up modifying these some in response to experience and feedback from the community (if you’ve got ideas on how to improve these, we’d love to hear ‘em). But we reckon they’re a pretty good start.
I (Jason) presented TI at the SPARC Open Access Meeting in Kansas City last week. It was an interesting event, with a mix of in-the-trenches librarians, publishers, institutional repository folk, and business people representing the growing range of products and services springing up around Open Science. I found the engagement and growth of this latter group encouraging, since it’s where we see TI ending up.
There was ample skepticism about TI: bit publisher reps were very interested, but non-committal, giving the sense that they want to see a more stable legal/org entity before they take the SaaS plunge. Many librarians had initial “it’s a toy, my faculty care only for IF” reactions, although these tended to thaw after more explanation. Both reactions underscore for me the importance of 1) establishing a trustworthy legal identity for TI and 2) continuing to do outreach and research around the idea of altmetrics in general.
There was a lot of encouraging enthusiasm, as well. The TI poster was mobbed. Several repositories expressed heavy interest in embedding TI stats, and some libraries were interested in contributing plugins. Was great to hear folks say “someone isfinallydoing this…it’s just what we’ve been wanting!”
Another highlight was a great chat with John Wilbanks; the more I hear him talk, the more his open-sci insight and knowledge impresses me. Turns out he’s been keeping well abreast of TI and altmetrics, and has good things to say about total-impact’s future prospects, which was great to hear. I also got a chance to talk with smart folks from the Kauffman Foundation at a dinner they set up; they had thoughtful things to say about the Value Of Entrepreneurship, and why a for-profit startup could be the best structure for even a mission-driven project like us.
So, overall an educational and useful event. Thanks to SPARC for putting it on!
If you want lots of details about total-impact, check out the total-impact google group. That’s where we share news as it happens, post work in process, and actively ask for ideas. Unsolicited feedback and ideas are very welcome too!
We also have a twitter account where we tweet and retweet things of interest: @totalimpactdev
Want to email us? totalimpactdev@gmail.com
total-impact has come full circle: we were born out of a hackathon thrown by the Beyond Impact project, funded by the Open Society Foundations. Now we’re being generously supported from that same Beyond Impact grant, helping us move from prototype to a reliable, scaleable service.
The budget on the grant is pretty simple: £16k goes to open-source devs Cottage Labs to help build out Jean-Claude, our next release. The other £1k flew me here to Edinburgh to work with CL for a week. There are more details in our grant application; in keeping with our radical transparency philosophy, we are posting that as a gDoc here, so you can see more specifics.
It probably goes without saying that we’re really excited about this grant…it’s a great chance to work with Cottage Labs, a great vote of confidence from Beyond Impact, and a great push toward our goal of revolutionizing the dissemination and evaluation of scholarship.
Special thanks to Cameron Neylon for his vision and leadership in setting up the original workshop, for suggesting we apply for funding, and for helping us along when we did.
This week Jason is Edinburgh working with the crackerjack devs of Cottage Labs. I’m still getting clearance to announce the details, but TI has gotten a tidy grant and Cottage Labs are getting most of it.
It’s awesome working with Cottage on this stuff. They are super skilled, great to work with, and have built their whole shop around open-source approaches to solving problems in academia. CL were the natural choice to work with, and I’ve not been disappointed.
The goal of this week-long sprint is to get get the main pieces in place for Jean-Claude, our next release (scheduled for mid-May). We’ve been at it three days now, and I’m finally getting settled in enough to start posting about it (will do better next time). Today I’ll be posting some of the stuff we’ve been whiteboarding. If you want to look at code, though, check out our new repo at https://github.com/total-impact/total-impact .
Happy to announce that total-impact has received an honourable mention in the 2012 UBC Library Innovative Dissemination of Research Award competition.
The UBC Library Innovative Dissemination of Research Award honours UBC faculty, staff and students who expand the boundaries of research through the creative use of new tools and technologies.
Supposedly there were 25 strong candidates this year. The winner, Sea Around Us, looks fantastic.
The main reason I (Heather) am thrilled is that it is such a cool award. We want this, right? We want our academics experimenting with new ways to disseminate their research results, and we want to learn about innovative disseminations.
Do other university libraries have similar programs?
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.