Oh hey! How's it going with Snowdrift? I first heard about you guys back in 2016 and the project sounded interesting and ambitious, but little news since then...
In late 2016, we (ironically) ran out of funding to pay our lead developer (who has stuck around as a volunteer but with greatly reduced capacity). Since then, development progress on the site itself has been mostly stagnant — we are still in a very soft launch, where you can sign up and pledge real money in the system, but Snowdrift.coop itself is the only project; we've held off on any kind of public announcement because (1) the site UX needs a bit of work, and (2) we don't want to give the impression that funding ourselves is the goal of the project.
While development hasn't seen much progress, other areas have:
- Formed a preliminary board of directors[1], currently working on drafting our bylaws, hopefully done (ready for lawyer review) by the end of the month.
- Moved most of our hosting from AWS to managed infrastructure from the Oregon State University's Open Source Lab (OSUOSL)[2]. This will be great once we're all the way migrated, since infrastructure maintenance has taken up a lot of the limited time that would have gone towards development.
- Almost-finished setting up a civicrm instance[3], to better organize the contact info of the many people who have expressed interest in helping over the years.
- Design folks have continued iterating to solve the site's current UX issues and clean up its css, to make it more approachable to volunteers with limited time. A lot of that has been implemented in a static site generator prototype[4], but we've been missing a good process for getting it integrated back into the main site. I've been working on this slowly for the past few weeks, and am taking next week off to hopefully finish that, so we can get that progress onto the main site.
- I'm not sure of the timeline, but we also moved our code to gitlab.com[5] and our mailing lists to a discourse forum[6]. Almost all development (discussion, project management, and code) now takes place in those two places.
We've also kept up weekly team meetings[7], usually attended between 5-7 team members (the total team size right now is ~10, with varying levels of activity). Progress may have been slow (picking up a little recently), but the project is in no danger of dying. Just to come full circle and tie back with my first post, the main things we still need for a full launch are:
1) Updated UX on the main site, ideally facilitated by making the frontend more approachable. This is why we can use help from anyone with css experience.
2) Backend support for multiple projects. This is why we can use help from Haskellers.
3) Governance and bylaws fully in place. This is why we can use help from a lawyer.
