Brave, Sloan, Ford… and You
On November 1st 2016 Andrew Nesbitt announced that libraries.io — his two-year-old side project — was growing up and joining Brave New Software with support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Today it’s my turn to announce that we have added the support of the Ford Foundation too.
In truth, this has always been the plan. Josh Greenberg at Sloan, Michael Brennan at Ford, Andrew and myself knew that individually we would be unable to support such a fledgling project alone. Josh and Michael worked tirelessly to guide us and I would like to thank them wholeheartedly for trail-blazing us through the first collaborative grant between these two institutions for a project based in the UK.
This announcement sets the scene for what comes next; for what we would like Libraries.io to become: a collaborative project between individuals, organisations and institutions — perhaps even governments. Our first fund provided the support necessary for me to leave my job at mySociety and join Andrew to work on libraries.io full-time until January 1st 2018. But that’s not going to be enough.
We need you.
I sympathise with the incomparable Richard Pope here. I find it difficult to describe what I do. In our applications to Sloan and Ford, I’m described as a “Head of Product”, but on my Twitter profile it merely says I’m “the other guy”. Why? Because that’s the most concise description of my role.
At Libraries.io, Andrew handles the bulk of the technical work, and I fill in the gaps. I’ll handle some coding sometime — and believe me, after a four-year break you’re going to be screaming at some of my commits — but 90% of my time will be spent elsewhere. Since I joined the core team on December 1st, I have been completing our application to Ford, setting our strategy, establishing a governance process, appointing a board of advisors, identifying partners to use our service and our data, and highlighting events that we will use to share our work. Now that’s in place, it’s time for me to give Libraries.io itself a bit of attention. As a believer in the gov.uk-inspired movement of digital service design, that all starts with the user. So when I say ‘we need you’ what I mean is:
I need you.
For me this process starts with personas. I’ve set up a few here on GitHub. If you use Libraries.io, it would be great to hear whether you relate to any of them. If you work in software development and don’t use libraries.io then check out the site and tell us what your first impressions are in our public Slack channel.
From there we will establish a number of use cases and then target improvements, new features and priorities alongside our commitments to our supporters.
Both Andrew and myself are committed to a number of targets, all of which we are confident we can deliver over the course of the year, and all of which we will be publishing under a policy of disclosure and transparency that we know our community deserves. We will keep the boat afloat but we have our work to do already. Perhaps what I really mean to say is:
We need you.
We need you to tell us what you use Libraries.io for, what you need it to do and how it can be improved. And then we need you to build it.
Andrew and I are here for you. We will do everything we can to support you — including establishing a process for paying for your time — but we can’t do it all. We have plenty of guidance on getting Libraries.io set up and how we want our community to work together. We are improving our wiki to help you understand how this ball of chewing-gum and elastic bands keeps rolling along, and we will continue to up the level of documentation, comments and test coverage to help you be more productive with your time. We’ll also highlight issues on our GitHub repository that are ideal for content producers, user experience designers, systems operators and first-time contributors. Our role is to help you help us because our hope is that:
We need each other.
Thanks
