2022’s MTF projects changed the behavior of large platforms, highlighted pressing problems for policymakers and had a direct impact on communities’ understanding of bias and transparency in social media. Among the direct impacts that our awardees reported resulted from their MTF awards were the following:
- “The work completed using this award had a significant impact on the community, particularly on teenagers who participated in the workshops and installations. By exhibiting at the public library, the project attracted a diverse audience, including many young people who became more critical of their own TikTok feeds.”
- “Create[d] space for discussion on critical aspects of creative applications of AI in higher education settings for students and staff.”
Infrastructure
Many of our 2022 awardees tackled large infrastructure builds—whether that meant crafting new open source tooling from scratch or ground-up rewrites of aging codebases—that would have been difficult to resource without MTF funding. Open source projects are often strapped for time and resources—many are maintained part-time by engineers working full-time jobs—and MTF seeks to provide projects with the support to allow core maintainers to focus their time and energy on ambitious technical projects.
Among the new pieces of infrastructure that our awardees reported building using their MTF awards were the following:
- “As this project built a software system and application from scratch, all of the tools produced represent infrastructure for new and future projects in this area.”
- “This award allowed the team to build a major piece of infrastructure: the open-source TikTok analyzer tool. This tool has not only been beneficial for [our] project but has also been adopted by other artists within the community for their own work and by a PhD researcher investigating TikTok further.”
- “The MTF award enabled us to build the following infrastructure: Major revision of code base; Documentation of code; Algorithm for more inclusive and more robust speaker recognition evaluation datasets; Proposal for guidelines on evaluating speaker recognition technology; Database of speaker recognition technology vendors, deployers and deployed applications and; Introductory explainer video about topic area.”
Maintenance
MTF is one of few funds that encourages open source maintainers to use their funding to pay down technical debt, conduct ongoing maintenance and address security issues. We see this unglamorous day-to-day work as a core component of technical sustainability for open source projects. When teams consistently prioritize building new features over maintaining their core infrastructure, the result is brittle technologies that are unable to scale well. MTF encourages projects to include technical maintenance work in their project proposals, as well as infrastructure to help grow their communities (documentation, codes of conduct, participation and contribution guidelines, governance documents, etc.).
MTF grants funded many maintenance activities in 2022, including major refactors, housekeeping of community infrastructure and the removal of superfluous dependencies. Among the ongoing maintenance that our awardees completed using their MTF awards were the following:
- "This award contributed to supporting our code refactor, during which we systematized unit testing and removed non-essential dependencies.”
- “Our organization has experienced significant growth over the past year. We have improved our internal processes and have now achieved a state of organizational maturity that enables us to be more efficient and resilient."
- "Pre-payment to project senior developer to allow: sharing of all work to Github for the wider community to access following housekeeping and minor refactoring and; ongoing work in the form of funding assigned to maintain the system and its security for 6 months."