[Bigbang-dev] Prototype Fund

[Nick Doty]

Thanks for following up on this, Christoph.

I think it's an encouraging program to apply for as I really like the model
of a fund specific for public interest technology and for short-timeline
open source software development.

I don't know if this program funds work on existing open source projects or
only new projects that are producing their first prototypes. Also, the
English-language version of the webpage seems to suggest that they expect
teams to be located in Germany. I don't know if suggesting time/work that
would be done by other BigBang developers in other countries would be a
discouragement for funding the proposal, but I wouldn't want to cause any
problems for the proposal. (Personally, I would love to work on BigBang
more and be funded to do it, but I don't know right now what time I'll have
available depending on what I figure out for long-term employment.)

In terms of existing/alternative work, while I haven't seen much that is
directly similar to BigBang's focus on mailing list archive analysis
(honestly, I keep expecting that one day someone will just point us to some
other project that does all of this!), there are a couple previous
relevant, alternative projects to point to:
* ponymail, an Apache incubator project, provides a search interface for
mailing list archives that includes some basic statistical overviews
* the Enron Email Dataset prompted academic research on email, including
many individual analyses, although not much generalizable open source
software that I'm aware of: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~./enron/

I think a valuable project would be to start providing dashboards of the
current and historical status of some set of prominent mailing lists (like
IETF or W3C), so that there was an ongoing easily digestible overview of
the topics, traffic, etc. of an organization's email traffic. That could be
an entryway into the software that isn't just a Jupyter notebook analyzing
a particular research question (although I think that's a super valuable
format as well). But a dashboard overview for one organization could be a
good short-term prototype project, and I think it would be welcomed by IETF
or a similar Internet governance group, so it could be a good partnership
as well.

Hope this helps,
Nick

On Mon, Mar 15, 2021 at 6:02 PM Christoph Becker <chrbecker01 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi all,
> I just wanted to remind everyone that the deadline for the Prototype Fund
> <https://prototypefund.de/en/> is at the 30th of March.
> Thus if you are still interested to implement your ideas and be payed for
> it, let me know and I will include them in the proposal (as has to be
> written in German and can only be submitted by someone registered in
> Germany).
>
> Best Wishes,
> Christoph
>
> --
> <><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>
>
>
> *Christoph Becker (he/him/his)PhD at the*
> *Institute for Data Science and*
> *Institute for Computational Cosmology*
> *Durham University*
> *United Kingdom*
> *christovis.github.io* <http://christovis.github.io>
> _______________________________________________
> Bigbang-dev mailing list
> Bigbang-dev at data-activism.net
> https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/bigbang-dev
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ghserv.net/pipermail/bigbang-dev/attachments/20210315/c8193d98/attachment.htm>