in progress works

Connecting Research with Community - Civic Innovation Lab

Welcome to Civic Innovation Lab, where we drive social impact through collaborative solutions and empower communities. Join us in fostering sustainable development, co-creating initiatives, and advancing inclusive governance for a better future.

A System for Sustainable FOSS

Disclaimers: This system is still a work in process. I look forward to reading (and incorporating!) y...

Robot Pedantry, Human Empathy

Homebrew was the first open source project I’ve maintained where I’ve had to review and merge contributions from other users. Homebrew is also one of the most active community projects on GitHub with a consistently small team of maintainers (always under thirty in total, always under ten doing work every week). As a result I’ve had to figure out over the last twelve years how best to manage large numbers of contributions from users in pleasantly and efficiently for both maintainers and contributors.

Creating and growing healthy community open source projects [PLoP 2020]

Abstract: This article presents a succinct and minimal handbook of best practices of how to create and grow community open source projects. We start with the assumption that the handbook’s user has…

Aspiration | Better Tools for a Better World

It's our 23rd Anniversary! Nonprofit staff, developers, capacity builders, and grassroots activists will convene at the 2026 Nonprofit Software Development Summit, 18-20 November, 2026, to share knowledge, build capacity, and collectively envision the future of free, open and equitable digital tools and practices to support social change efforts.

A ten-year drive to credit authors for their work — and why there’s still more to do

Nature - Information about the roles of each author of a paper can help to build trust, integrity and responsible research assessment. Coordinated efforts are needed to consolidate progress.

third-party apis: community infrastructure on atproto - Keith's Thoughts

you can just build things from an open set of tools

bnewbold.net

It has been a wild 18 months working at Bluesky on atproto. Goalposts and narratives have a way of getting pulled around by crises and the priorities of the week, making it is easy to lose track of the big picture. In this post, i'm dredging up some of my own early notes on goals and values for the protocol, to see how much progress has been made.

Pacing consensus

Good development, huge challenge.

Sustainable coordination in research labs via graph-enabled idea boards

Our 'graph-enabled idea board' serves as a hub for capturing excess research ideas, allocating microprojects, and properly attributing credit. We'd like to investigate its potential for enabling newcomers to quickly and effectively contribute to ongoing projects.

[Proposal] WG for group/community standards and infrastructure in ATProto

TLDR: I’m proposing a working group to develop shared interoperable standards for community infrastructure within ATProto. Many teams are independently making foundational design decisions about group/community membership, governance, and infrastructure. Without coordination, a de facto standard will calcify from momentum rather than deliberate evaluation of the ranges of community needs. I provide initial questions and principles to start discussion. Many people, apps and projects in developme...

Keep Your Friends Close — Open Tech Strategies | Blog

One of the insider secrets of free and open source software (FOSS) is that most of the rules a project uses on a day-to-day basis are not found in the software’s license. There are contribution guidelines, which are enforced by the project only taking contributions that meet them. There are codes of conduct, which are a condition of community participation. There are endorsements, official membership, a voice in setting the project roadmap, and all kinds of other benefits that attach to varying types of community participation. In each case, entirely external to the license, there are official rules and unwritten norms that govern how participants gain the benefits of joining the civic life of a project.

Governing Together: Toward Infrastructure for Community-Run Social Media

Decentralizing the governance of social computing systems to communities promises to empower them to make independent decisions, with nuance and in accordance with their values. Yet, communities do not govern in isolation. Many problems communities face are common, or move across their boundaries. We therefore propose designing for "inter-community governance:" mechanisms that support relationships and interactions between communities to coordinate on governance issues. Drawing from workshops with 24 individuals on decentralized, community-run social media, we present six challenges in designing for inter-community governance surfaced through ideas proposed in workshops. Together, these ideas come together as an ecosystem of resources, infrastructures, and tools that highlight three key principles for designing for inter-community governance: modularity, forkability, and polycentricity. We end with a discussion of how the ideas proposed in workshops might be implemented in future work aiming to support community governance in social computing systems broadly.

The DevRel Path to Success: Awareness, Enablement, Engagement — Mary Thengvall - Community Builder

Whether you’re trying to figure out what type of Developer Relations professional to hire or trying to decide which of your team members is responsible for which tasks, having a clear framework with which to divide the responsibilities and focus our work is important. In this blogpost we’ll talk abo