Tag: governance

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updates

Inside the 2024 Catalyst Member Retreat

Feat. our ongoing quest to find a logo for PUDL.

Catalyst is a fully-remote organization with members living all over North America. Our floating cyborg heads are besties, but we’re privy to the power of an analog hang. As such, we host an annual member retreat. This year we chose to meet in Mexico City because it seemed like fun and because it overlapped well with this year’s CSV conf (see Zane’s talk here!)

We booked an Airbnb with a few buffer days so folks could explore the city before getting down to business hashing out Catalyst’s future. We perspired, ate popsicles, and pinched ourselves a few times to make sure we were actually there. Even though we had a lot of work planned for the next few days, we agreed that the retreat would be a success even if all we did was get together.

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updates

Workplace Democracy and Open Source

This year at csv,conf,v8 in Puebla, Mexico I gave a talk on our experience as a democratic worker cooperative creating digital public goods, and why we think co-ops are potentially a good fit for creating public-interest technology. You can watch the recorded talk on YouTube, or read on for a bloggified version of the talk below.

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weeknotes

Weeknotes 2021-03-19

What We’re Doing

The Census DP1 GeoDatabase has been integrated into PUDL as a standalone SQLite DB for use with the EIA 861 to compile historical utility and balancing authority service territories, and with FERC 714 data in estimating state level historical hourly electricity demand. Previously it was had an ad-hoc non-standard ETL process.

Our documentation now has an index all of the PUDL DB tables, including the names of the columns, their data types, and descriptions of the contents, thanks to some work with Jinja templates by Austen. This is just one small part of a bigger docs overhaul as we try and get PUDL 0.4.0 out by the end of March.

PUDL is finally compatible with Python 3.9, using both pip and conda. The last dependency to make the transition was Numba, which as of v0.53.0 works with Python 3.9. Our CI is now running tests on both Python 3.8 and 3.9.

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