Discuss Ethical Implications re Diagnosis and Repair of Phone Your Rep Bugs

[PamelaJohn]

History

In late 2016, a team of eleven ProgCode volunteers built the Phone Your Rep app under the team leadership of @msimonborg. PYR quickly became a very popular application within the ProgCode community as well as in the broader Github open source tech community. In Fall 2017 Matt had to step down as project lead, because life! 🙂 Shortly thereafter, users began reporting a 403 error on the ProgCode PYR project management board.

Description

This week while helping @andygimma diagnose and repair ProgCode's Member & Channel scraper bots, I discovered ProgCode still hosts PYR on its Heroku account.

A look at the PYR Heroku instance indicates at least one fatal error related to the database. (There may be additional errors, but I am not qualified to make that determination.)

It may be possible to get PYR back up and running by recruiting volunteer contributors to diagnose and repair existing Heroku issues.

Problem

Potential ethical considerations come up when contemplating whether to proceed with this issue.:

1. • Does recruiting volunteers to diagnose/fix the issues with PYR in the absence of the Tech Lead infringe on ProgCode's promise of project autonomy if the remaining tech team is interested in continuing to maintain the code base?
2. • If the answer to Question 1 is yes, would taking a community vote and/or poll of the project's original volunteer contributors cure any potential infringement on project autonomy assuming the vote/poll passes?

Benefit

Making PYR functional again would help fulfill the ProgCode mission of removing or reducing the impact of big money in politics by supporting the creation of open source tech tools to empower the grassroots.

Plan

• Community discussion of these considerations at the Operations Meeting on Monday, December 17, 2018, 8pm ET.
• If the outcome of the community discussion indicates there is no infringement on project autonomy, plan next steps (i.e., team member outreach, poll of PYR tech team, community vote, etc.) at a future Operations Meeting. Date of any future Ops meeting tbd since 12/24 and 12/31 are U.S. Holidays.

Decision Making

Community Discussion only at this time.

Reference links

Phone Your Rep website
Project Management Repo 1
Project Management Repo 2
Project Management Repo 3
ProgCode Project Board Listing

cc: @msimonborg @kylebutts @rthbound @rapi-castillo

[stephenscapelliti]

One consideration could be to fork the repo to the ProgCode repo - leaving Matt's work intact - and then make modifications/updates to the copy.

[msimonborg]

Hi everyone!

Thanks for bringing this up and cc'ing me. Weird timing because as you say I had to take a hard step back for life and career developments but in the last couple weeks I've started slowly easing back into my old projects. PYR has been on my mind, particularly with the thought of a new congress and shifting power dynamic in Washington.

I think I have renewed bandwidth to aid in getting this up and running again and continue to develop it as a useful tool for the tech community and citizenry at-large. I had also worked on some other projects in the PYR universe that I'd be willing to continue work on if the ProgCode community thinks there's value in pursuing them:

• https://github.com/msimonborg/pyr Ruby gem that wraps the Phone Your Rep API for ease of developing Ruby apps consuming PYR data
• https://github.com/msimonborg/rate-your-rep Platform for calling reps in Congress and rating/reviewing the experience a la Yelp. Individual district offices are rated separately. Data provided by Phone Your Rep API via the PYR gem.
• https://github.com/msimonborg/pyr-call-router Text your zip code to a bot phone number and receive an automated call listing your reps in congress and all of their offices sorted by proximity to the user. Connects user directly to the office of their choice. Powered by PYR gem and Twilio.

The first step in any of those would of course be the API itself, priority # 1. If given access to the Heroku instance I think I could diagnose and fix the problem(s).

I don't see myself being able to devote as much time to this or other projects as I did before, but I'd love to re-engage as a developer and creator and hope that someone else may be willing to take a greater leadership role.

[stephenscapelliti]

So glad to know you're doing well, @msimonborg! This is great news. These new projects sound fascinating, and there has been a lot of interest in PYR from some of our newer members during onboardings, many of whom have used it.

The staff can help you with outreach to the ProgCode community and hopefully pull together a team and team leads. If you have time to schedule a project onboarding, we can get some details about these new projects, add them to the list, and promote them in the ProgCode Slack. Let @PamelaJohn or me (@stephenscapelliti) know.

[PamelaJohn]

Hi @msimonborg, it's so great to hear from you and to know you're doing well! This is really exciting news. Earlier this year the community developed an pilot project for keeping OS projects afloat when life intervenes. The pilot is called Project Lifeboat and it's in an early test stage. Would love to get your feedback on ways that the community can help decentralize and distribute responsibilities for maintenance as well as safeguard access to digital assets in a way that doesn't infringe on our promise of project autonomy.

We also launched a Patreon account at the end of 2018. It's possible ProgCode could do a fundraising campaign to cover the fees necessary to sustain PYR in the long term.

Whenever you're able to carve out a little time to catch up and talk about next steps, please feel free to contact us on Slack or email [email protected]. (Email addy goes to all of the members of the ProgCode Ops Team.)

Again, so nice great to know you're doing well!