We just heard: total-impact has been awarded $125k by the Sloan Foundation! What’s this mean for users?  By April 1, 2013, we plan to hit important milestones in three areas: Product: addition of over a dozen new information sources to total-impact.org, particularly data repositories 60 github watchers, 20 forks substantial innovation in user interfaces for [...]

Total-impact has outgrown its baby teeth: we are rearchitecting the codebase.  The goal is a robust and scaleable framework that will take us through the next phase of rapid growth. The new codebase will have a clean api, a webapp that uses the api directly, data storage at the item level, a history of metric [...]

Total-impact will always be open-source.  It is a pretty standard OSS project in its early stages: its core developers are geographically distributed and contributions have been fueled by enthusiasm rather than paycheques.  Producing Open Source Software gives a great overview of standard processes for these sorts of projects. At the same time, Jason and I (Heather) [...]

We’ve submitted a revision to our Sloan Foundation grant in response to comments and feedback from them, and to reflect some updated ideas we’ve had. The biggest change is the budget. I’m close to full-time already because TI is my dissertation. But we’ve boosted Heather’s grant salary to the point where she’d only be 50% [...]

As part of our Sloan Foundation grant process, we were asked to come up with some measurable outcomes. This ended up being a really valuable exercise, and I anticipate we’ll be checking back with these pretty regularly. We expect not only to reach these goals by April 2013, but also that our chosen metrics will [...]

We talk a lot about metrics. And when you do that, there’s always the risk what you’re measuring or why will become unclear. So this is worth repeating, as was reminded in a nice conversation with Anurag Acharya of Google Scholar (thanks Anurag!). Metrics are no good by themselves. They are, however, quite useful when [...]

With most big companies you could hand over your source code and your business plan and they still would not be a threat to you. -Paul Graham

I (Jason) presented TI at the SPARC Open Access Meeting in Kansas City last week. It was an interesting event, with a mix of in-the-trenches librarians, publishers, institutional repository folk, and business people representing the growing range of  products and services springing up around Open Science. I found the engagement and growth of this latter [...]

We’ve been thinking a lot lately about how TI can make money to support infrastructure and future development. We’re still unsure what kind of organisational structure will best serve the goals we’ve got for TI (a conventional startup, a B Corp, a non-profit foundation, or something else?). But we’re increasingly sure that there’s a clear [...]