OA Button Weekly Update Week 3

Sep 10, 2013 • 2 min read

The biggest thing that happened this week was our OA Button Hackathon (#oabuttonhack) at Top Office Machines, Shoreditch, home of Original Content London. After having been organised in just under 2 weeks the weekend aimed to bring our developers together to work on the project.

We spent the hackday finishing troubleshooting and fixing problems from our python port and made a lot of good progress. We managed to simplify various areas of our code, started work one of our major routes of getting access and a dozen other bits. One big step forward was clustering of data points on our map of denials. This will allow our map to shows thousands of points without looking awful.

Over the weekend, we also worked on our strategy for the button, our key messaging and design for the button (get in touch if you want to help), ultimately we made lots of progress.

We’d like to thank everyone who made the weekend possible. Shout out to Edward Sapiera and Stuart Lawson who got us the venue. Of course we must thank the programmers Andy Lulham, Florian Rathgeber, Tom Pollard, Victor Ng, Reece Squires, Peter Murray Rust, Jez Cope, Martin Eve. We also had many great visitors from Jon Tennant (sorry, we mean @protohedgehog), Stuart Lawson, Shane and Amye from BioMed Central and special thanks to the people we’ve forgotten and Gulliver, the Open Access turtle. Finally, thanks to the R2RC who provided some funds to feed the hungry team.

This week, we’ll be releasing our call for student leaders in addition to our project management and development calls. This week our minimum viable product (available here) will be discussed. On top of this there’ll be our normal design and development work. We’ve had a busy few weeks to say the least.

In other news, David, one of the co-leads will be speaking about the Open Access Button at a colloquium in Belfast during Open Access Week. More to come on that soon.

ps. If you’d like to re-live last weeks progress you can find it here!

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