Project Highlight: ‘GeoBlacklight February’

By Karen Majewicz

The month of February always features two big events in the GeoBlacklight community: Geo4LibCamp and the Winter Community Sprint.

Geo4LibCamp was scaled back this year to a single “Community Day.” Members from the BTAA-GIN served on the planning committee and presented during the lightning talks.

The GeoBlacklight bi-annual Community Sprints are hosted by BTAA-GIN staff. The February sprint was our most productive event and undoubtedly featured the most participants. We had over a dozen people representing Cornell, Harvard, Johns Hopkins University, Princeton, Stanford, UMass Amherst, and the University of Minnesota / Big Ten Academic Alliance. Moreover, five contributors made their very first code commits to GeoBlacklight during this event. At the end, we heard positive feedback, including that it was welcoming, organized, and easy to find ways to contribute. Sentiments expressing desired changes were mainly around the technical difficulty of getting GeoBlacklight installed locally. This represented a noticeable improvement from earlier sprints, in which participants struggled more in finding ways to contribute. Read more about the sprint here.