What We Accomplished in 2022

As we prepare for our upcoming roadmap sessions, we’re taking a look back at what we accomplished in 2022.

Trainings and collaborations

We had so many trainings in 2022! Through our Parsons Parties, we developed and ran trainings on eight different topics: Getting Started with Parsons, Intro to Python, ETL Best Practices, All About Authentication, Scheduling Scripts, Debugging and Testing, and Intro to Contributing.

Several of these were run multiple times as we work on improving the content. All of them have a recording and/or written guide available on the website.

In addition to our Parsons Party trainings, we collaborated with four other organizations to provide trainings to their communities: DigiDems, re:power, America Votes, and Generation Data.

These trainings were developed and led by a combination of six community members: Shauna Gordon-McKeon, Cormac Martinez del Rio, brittany bennett, Usha Yeruva, Ismael Melendez, and Bobby Casteneda.

The contributor community

27 people contributed 100+ pull requests to the Parsons repository in 2022. 13 of them were new and 14 were returning contributors. More than half of the people who contributed pull requests contributed more than one.

We added 6 new connectors (Scytl, Auth0, TargetSmart, Google Admin, ActBlue and DonorBox) with several more currently in progress. These connectors were largely contributed by community members, including Margaret Parsa and Tori Marbois of ActBlue, Ben Stroud of TargetSmart, as well as Adam Greenspan, Kathy Nguyen, and Shauna Gordon-McKeon.

We also worked hard on fixing bugs and adding features for our existing connectors, and tried to improve reliability and usability for the package as a whole. Chris Lubinski led a major effort to improve dependency management in Parsons, and we also significantly improved the installation process. 

Community members contributed a number of guides and example scripts/use cases, which you can find on our website. And there are over 500 people in our Slack, many of whom contribute to the community by helping debug problems, sharing advice, welcoming new users, and letting us know about new jobs and opportunities.

The Parsons website, logo and calendar

We got a new website and logo in 2022! 

brittany bennett led the search for a new logo, and we couldn’t be happier with what we ended up with.

The website launched in October and is still quite new, but it already contains so much useful information, including: an events page that shows past and upcoming events and embeds the community calendar; our guides and use cases; and the community blog.

Data Workflows Panel

In June 2022, we held a very well attended Progressive Workflows Panel where four technical leaders in the community, from CTA, TMC, Working Families Party and MoveOn, shared with the audience how they pull progressive data tools together. We had over a hundred signups and about sixty attendees, and an amazing conversation. You can find links to the recording, presenter slides, and a list of questions answered in the chat here.

The New Connector Cohort

The New Connector Cohort was a somewhat ill-timed experiment. We wanted to create space for a small group of community members to go through a more advanced and in-depth training: in this case, through the process of contributing a new connector to Parsons. The training covered a variety of practical topics, including how classes work in Python, and unit testing and mocks. You can see the curriculum here.

Unfortunately, we decided to do this in September, and did not leave enough time for people to complete the cohort before the 2022 midterm elections. Although there was significant progress made! We are optimistic that we’ll have more success running this cohort again, or similar cohorts, as long as we schedule it for a time that’s not right before an election.

The Stuff We Can’t See

There’s so much that makes up an activity that can’t be summarized in a blog post: informal hangouts, quick pairing sessions, help given on Slack threads, jobs found through the #jobs channel, and all the mentorship, commiseration, encouragement and celebration our community members provide to each other. 

Thank you to everyone who participated in the Parsons community in 2022, in big ways and small ways, in measurable ways and in intangible ones. We’re so excited to see what 2023 brings.