Free Law Project Technical Modularity and Work Efficiency

The technical modularity of the Free Law Project, CourtListener, JuriScraper, and everything inbetween is very high. By using BitBucket (similar to Github), community members are able to edit, commit, and merge changes very easily. These changes can be seen by running the application suite on their own computers with a pull/merge request. This makes it much easier for everyone, hypothetically, to have the most up to date version of each application running when they are editing it. While the file size of the corpus is over gigabytes large, one can skip the large file downloads and run the application shell.

The community definitely mirrors the technical modularity of the project. We work mostly on our own sections, and submit/push for Brian/Michael's approval. This means that each part can be edited independently of the others, allowing for easy swappability and implementation of site features. Since we are a new project, collaboration isn't very necessary. When we have a larger development community with more people working on a single project, synchronous collaboration will occur more often. Right now, we own our contributions and branches. Due to this, there is very little structure to our collaboration. Most meetings are planned on a weekly or bi-weekly basis, and changes are added whenever ready. The work gets done efficiently, though not very quickly. For the amount of people working on the project (and for the amount of time they have to spend each week), we get things done a lot quicker than a corporate environment would.