OSI Board Report on ClearlyDefined

Monthly report in preparation for board meeting April 12, 2018

Summary

Our focus on service robustness and improvements has been beneficial. We were able to rescan components with the new version of Scancode and scan new components as well. Now we are progressing to contributions and curations as the next stage of progression. We are in the midst of building out a workflow for users to make contributions to the data to enable the next important piece of the project: curation.

Resources

Infrastructure resources continue to be donated by Microsoft and are sufficient to continue to meet our needs.

We do anticipate needing work from freelance developers soon. We are working on coordinating potential donations from organizations we have talked to about ClearlyDefined and use those donations for freelance work on the service and website. We are actively exploring this this month and hope to be in a position to hire these developers within two months. We have arranged with Patrick, Josh, and Phyllis around the logistics of donations and payments and once we have secured the donations we will explore freelance developer options. We’ll likely update the board next month around where development resources will be coming from.

Technology

We have upgraded the version of Scancode, added integrations for scanning NuGet packages, and improved robustness and fixed bugs for the service. We are working on implementing a contributor workflow on clearlydefined.io. We now have thousands of components that have been harvested and scanned.

Our next goal is completing the contribution workflow and beginning to enable contributions and curations on the data. We will likely be working on this fully for the next month.

Community

The community continues to grow, we have an expanding list of people interested in contributing, becoming users, and participating in other ways. We have had many productive meetings with potential partners who are interested in using the data, curating the data, and/or themselves becoming clearly defined.

Upcoming goals

• Curation community: we continue to have productive and positive meetings with potential members interested in data curation. We have not, however, fully enabled the entire user experience to empower curators, so in parallel with building the technology we are getting engagement in the community. Jeff McAffer will be presenting a workshop at LLW in Barcelona around curation and will likely get more ideas around its principles as well as more potential community interest.
• Further integrations and broader harvesting/scanning: Many of the potential users of the data have expressed interest in package managers or components we don’t yet have the integrations we need to be able to scan. We are working on getting more integrations with other package managers (some of which the community may end up contributing code for) and subsequently broadening our harvesting and scanning in order to ultimately have more component data available for more potential users.