Openverse Priorities Brainstorm

This call for feedback and discussion will be open until September 5th.

The OpenverseOpenverse Openverse is a search engine for openly-licensed media, including images and audio. Find Openverse on GitHub and at https://openverse.org. community held a prioritization meeting on August 10th to discuss next steps for upcoming projects. You can read the notes from that conversation here. Since that meeting, we’ve completed a number of the projects discussed:

  • APIAPI An API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways. Stability & Performance Mitigation
  • Re-enable data refreshes
  • Catalog Operational Improvements

I (@zackkrida) would like to take some time now to discuss what our next projects should be. To kickoff the conversation I’ll start with some ideas, proposing projects grouped by the primary repository in which work will take place.

I’ve tried to strike a balance between operational improvements and implementing new features. We still need to do more work on getting documentation for these projects live on this Make site and handbook, but can do so after we’ve reached consensus on next steps.

Here are my project ideas, by repository:

Frontend

  • Copy Improvements. Make text-only edits across the Openverse experience to clarify user flows, actions, and the value Openverse brings to the community.
  • iFrameiframe iFrame is an acronym for an inline frame. An iFrame is used inside a webpage to load another HTML document and render it. This HTML document may also contain JavaScript and/or CSS which is loaded at the time when iframe tag is parsed by the user’s browser. MigrationMigration Moving the code, database and media files for a website site from one server to another. Most typically done when changing hosting companies.. Migrate Openverse away from the current iframe-ed solution and switch to a dedicated domain name.

API

  • Result Sorting Options. Allow users to use the current ‘Recommended’ algorithm, but also a new ‘most recent’ sort option. This would require accompanying frontend work. It would be a nice introduction for our our developers on how the results are currently sorted while providing a useful feature to users.

Catalog

  • Provider Script Refactors. This operational improvement will allow us to make bulk changes to the base class in the future and embrace a standardized approach to writing provider scripts.
  • 3D Model Support. While 3D model support will take place across all three of our repositories, work can begin in the catalog to build relationships with providers; start writing provider scripts; and start collecting 3D model metadata.

I’m looking forward to these ideas being a launch point for additional discussion, specifically around who would like to volunteer to lead these project(s) and other project ideas you think take priority.