Note: A more up to date description of the Particip.io projects and ways to get involved are posted in the Particip.io category.
Edgeryders is launching a new software development project! I’ve recently received 100k EUR grant from the Swedish Arts Grants Committee fund Kulturbryggan to develop open source web based software for participatory culture organisations and collaboration between artists working on big projects. Only Swedish residents or organisations are eligible for this fund, so I applied with my own company with Edgeryders as a collaborating partner, and received the grant in full to my own company. However, I will funnel most of these funds into Edgeryders which will be the party responsible for research and development. We’re calling the initiative Particip.io, and the plan is to both continue development on a number of ongoing projects and to develop prototypes of new exciting ideas. Development will happen in a community that will hopefully live past this initial funding and continue development and deployment of the projects we’ll develop in a self-sustained fashion. Of course, that community will work and collaborate here on the Edgeryders platform.
Some ongoing projects will be included in Particip.io and the goal is to develop these to a state where they can be readily deployed with ease. Dreams, a platform to plan and distribute funds to projects at co-created events, will be developed to a state where it will be possible to use it for events without having access to a developer for setup and maintenance, and hosted as a service. It’s currently at a reasonably mature stage of development and has been used in production at multiple events over the last few years. Much of the development has been done by Gal Bracha, who is a founding partner of the Particip.io project who will also work on Dreams and coordinate development with the existing community tied to that platform. Realities, a platform to manage and visualise needs and responsibilities in a decentralised organisation, will be developed to state where it can be deployed in production for the Borderland, a participatory event and collaborative community in Scandinavia. Two developers who have worked on Realities before will join the Particip.io project – Erik Frisk and Matt Parsons.
Development of some components of SenseStack (GraphRyder, OpenEthnographer, EdgeSense) might also be included, but since those tools are vital to the newly funded POPREBEL project, it might make more sense to develop the SenseStack suite within that context.
In addition to working on existing projects, the Particip.io community will dream up, prototype and perhaps develop and deploy other platforms and tools for participatory art and culture. Our primary goal with these explorations is to push the boundaries of how we collaborate and dream together, and a secondary goal is to bring ideas to life that could spinn off into projects that could secure additional funding for the Particip.io community. @nadia will be involved in this part of the project, focusing on exploring what directions it could take.
How to get involved
Work on Particip.io will be done in four different forms:
- Open freelance development
- Exploratory hackathons
- Focused development weeks
- Freelance development
Open freelance development
You are more than welcome to contribute to the codebase and start working on an issue whenever you want to. You’ll be joining the Particip.io community, and developers who make consistent contributions may be invited to join for a hackathon or a focused development week or allotted paid hours to do more focused long term work.
Exploratory hackathons
A total of three hackathons will be held in 2019. These will be 4 days long, with 8-12 participants. Travel, food and accommodation will be paid for by the project. Each of these hackathons will focus on exploring and prototyping solutions to specific problems collected from participants on the ER platform. Participants in the hackathons are developers, designers, artists and visionaries. Hackathon participants must not be professionals, and it’s preferable to have a mix of people from different background. One hackathon will be hosted by Matt Parsons outside of Malmö, another will be held at Tivedstorp outside of Laxå and the location of the third hackathon is yet to be decided.
Focused development weeks
Much of the hands on development of the projects will happen during focused work weeks, where 2-4 developers and designers meet somewhere to design and code functional prototypes or new releases of some Particip.io project. Travel and accommodation is provided by the project, and each participant is also payed 1000 EUR for the week. In 2019, we will host at least 5 of these development weeks in locations decided on by the participants. Participants in these development weeks should be skilled developers or designers.
Paid freelance development
We have a total of 240 hours of freelance developer hours available at a rate of 40 EUR per hour. These hours will only be used by developers have participated in active development, have already contributed quality controlled additions to the code base of a project and want to spend freelance time on developing features or fixing bugs and issues.
Get involved
Go to the Particip.io category to get involved.
