Grants:Project/Hydriz/Balchivist 2.0/Midpoint

This project is funded by a Project Grant

proposal

people

timeline & progress

finances

midpoint report

final report

Report accepted

This midpoint report for a Project Grant approved in FY 2020-21 has been reviewed and accepted by the Wikimedia Foundation.

• To read the approved grant submission describing the plan for this project, please visit Grants:Project/Hydriz/Balchivist 2.0.
• You may still review or add to the discussion about this report on its talk page.
• You are welcome to email projectgrantswikimedia.org at any time if you have questions or concerns about this report.

Welcome to this project's midpoint report! This report shares progress and learning from the first half of the grant period.

Summary

In a few short sentences or bullet points, give the main highlights of what happened with your project so far.

• The frontend and backend projects for Balchivist 2.0 has been set up.
  • Frontend Git repository: https://github.com/balchivist/web
  • Backend Git repository: https://github.com/balchivist/api
  • API documentation: https://balchivist.github.io/api-docs/
• The development for Balchivist 2.0 is well underway.

Methods and activities

How have you setup your project, and what work has been completed so far?

Describe how you've setup your experiment or pilot, sharing your key focuses so far and including links to any background research or past learning that has guided your decisions. List and describe the activities you've undertaken as part of your project to this point.

• Scoped the project's requirements based on the existing functionality of Balchivist 1.0 and the possible use cases for the new Wikimedia dumps API.
• Set up the frontend project for Balchivist 2.0 using Nuxt.js and Vue.js.
• Set up the backend project for Balchivist 2.0 using Django and the Django REST framework.

Midpoint outcomes

What are the results of your project or any experiments you’ve worked on so far?

Please discuss anything you have created or changed (organized, built, grown, etc) as a result of your project to date.

• The database schema to be used for Balchivist 2.0 has been completed.
• The core functionality of allowing users to browse and view Wikimedia datasets is also complete.

Finances

Please take some time to update the table in your project finances page. Check that you’ve listed all approved and actual expenditures as instructed. If there are differences between the planned and actual use of funds, please use the column provided there to explain them.

Then, answer the following question here: Have you spent your funds according to plan so far? Please briefly describe any major changes to budget or expenditures that you anticipate for the second half of your project.

• As of 30 June 2022, I have spent 290 hours on the project, which represents $11,600.00 of the project's original budget.
• No changes to the budget is expected. However, it is likely that the scope of the project will be narrowed, which is explained in the Learning section.

Learning

The best thing about trying something new is that you learn from it. We want to follow in your footsteps and learn along with you, and we want to know that you are taking enough risks to learn something really interesting! Please use the below sections to describe what is working and what you plan to change for the second half of your project.

What are the challenges

What challenges or obstacles have you encountered? What will you do differently going forward? Please list these as short bullet points.

• The scope of the project was too large. The original project proposal was written based on knowledge of the existing Balchivist 1.0 functionality, as well as the experience from building it. However, the scope of the Balchivist 2.0 project was too wide and many features that were originally planned were not able to be completed.
• The project was using frameworks that I was not familiar with. Even though I was familiar with Python, using the Django framework was a new experience, along with Nuxt.js and Vue.js.

What is working well

What have you found works best so far? To help spread successful strategies so that they can be of use to others in the movement, rather than writing lots of text here, we'd like you to share your finding in the form of a link to a learning pattern.

• Learning patterns/When things go wrong, just tell people
• Learning patterns/Evaluating project outcomes

Next steps and opportunities

What are the next steps and opportunities you’ll be focusing on for the second half of your project? Please list these as short bullet points.

• Cleaning up of the project to prepare for an MVP launch.
• Deployment of Balchivist 2.0 to the Wikimedia Cloud VPS.
• Setting up of CI/CD pipelines to automate deployments.

Grantee reflection

We’d love to hear any thoughts you have on how the experience of being an grantee has been so far. What is one thing that surprised you, or that you particularly enjoyed from the past 3 months?

This grant project was a great learning experience for me, especially as a first-time grantee and the first time I have proposed a project. There were many factors that threatened to derail the project, but it was particularly pleasant to have the support of the grant officers and the Wikimedia Foundation to keep this project going. Although the scope of the project is going to be narrowed compared to what was originally proposed, I believe that the work will continue beyond this grant project to provide more functionality for users of the Wikimedia dumps.