Why Our Product For Jobseekers Had To Be Open Source
In Defense of Citizen-Led Public Services
About a year ago we started working on what now became Bob Emploi, a data-driven companion for jobseekers. Even if we did not know in the beginning how this thing would look like in the end, we already knew that we didn’t just want a black box that sits on the web and somehow helps people, written and understood only by us.
What we had in mind was the idea of building a citizen led public service: a service built by citizens that can be understood and improved by citizens. We first focused on launching the product, but now, two months after the launch, we finally made the complete code of our web application and most of the data analysis code accessible to the public. And this was the plan from the beginning.
Why we had to be open source
There are two main reasons for us to open source all of our code.
1. Transparency and intellectual honesty: We believe that algorithms, influencing the lives and choices of people, should be transparent and everybody should be able to understand what the actual metrics are, that these algorithms are trying to optimize.
2. Collaboration: We believe in the power of a citizen led public service, where everybody (with a sufficient technical background) can improve the current version of the platform, submit suggestions for improvement, extend it with new ideas or even start running their own version if they believe the current project is going in the wrong direction.
How you can help
There are many ways in which you can contribute to the project. You could fix bugs, add small features, work on tickets created by us, fork off the whole application or suggest your own ideas. We decided that we wanted to focus on building a platform to which the open source community can contribute with their creativity. We don’t want to ask for bug fixes or to check of items from our task list, where we would use the community simply to add manpower. We think that the most impactful and most satisfying contributions will come if we ask the community for their creativity. We want to serve as a platform to which our contributors can add with their own ideas and expertise. We hope for people to come up with solutions that we couldn’t think of. Either on a technical level or through domain expertise, for example if someone has detailed knowledge about how to best find a job in a very particular field. Or if there is a social welfare program that only applies to a very particular subset of the population.
We are currently in a transition where we shift the focus of Bob from being a daily coach to being personal advisor. The difference is that the previous focused on providing people with a tactic and a structure of how to execute daily tasks, the latter emphasizes a deep analysis of the user’s situation with subsequent strategical advice. When we started this transition we already kept contributions from the open source community in mind and conceived an architecture that allows to contribute advisor plugins to our platform. As soon as the internal APIs, and ‘The Advisor’ in general, stabilize, we plan to publish examples and manuals of how new advisor plugins can be contributed.
We chose the GPLv3 license for this project because we want to ensure that the code and its derivatives remain open as well as modifications be shared with the broader community, which is more in line with our vision for the kind of open service that we want to build. We want to enable other people, for example private companies or government agencies, to reuse the code, but we would still like them to keep the code open and also publish and share their improvements.
Bayes Impact was founded after the realization how a small group of people with the right technology can improve the lives of millions of others. Bob Emploi is an example where a team of around six people build a project that reaches hundreds of thousands of people and already showed positive impact in the first few weeks since its launch. We want to encourage the open source community to build on this platform and to show what is possible if this team of six suddenly becomes a team of 60 or 600.
Join the movement and contribute to our open source Bob Emploi!
