Free Open Source Software (FOSS) is software that can be used by the public for free. "Open Source" means the source code is also publicly available. Developers (or anyone) can view this code, report issues with it, and suggest changes to it.
Decatur Vote believes in collaboration, and we strive to make much of our software available to others for free, including other media organizations.
We have been & will continue working on updates to our website - this is why you haven't heard from us in awhile. This work will continue for now, and we'll get back to reporting when we can.
If you're not a software developer, you probably won't be interested in the rest of this article.
Find our FOSS
We have a Gitlab where our software is developed and you can make contributions, and a Facebook group where we'll post updates about our FOSS.
If you want updates about our software, you should join the Facebook group, as our primary Facebook Page is for reporting and significant updates about the business and our website. FOSS updates (after this one) will not be posted on our main Facebook Page.
Our first FOSS - Text Diff
Today, May 16th, 2023 marks the public launch of our first FOSS project, Text Diff, and we setup a companion Gitlab & Facebook Group.
We built TextDiff to keep a history of changes to articles we publish. It's a fairly minor utility, and there are many alternatives, but we created a tool that met our needs exactly, in the programming language we primarily use (PHP).
We've released this as our first FOSS project because our past projects have been developed as part of a monolith project and will take additional effort to extract without causing problems on our website.
What's next
In time, we plan to open source almost all of our software, most likely including the entire codebase for the website. In the shorter term, we will start releasing standalone tools we develop, like a scraper for Decatur City Council Agendas and a public data viewer for viewing data collected (primarily) from government agencies.
Our website is comprised of multiple (somewhat) separate Apps, which we'll try to start releasing soon. These are more integrated & depend on internal features we're not ready to release yet, so this will be delayed a bit until the code can be cleaned up.