Kristijan Armeni
Kristijan Armeni is a research scientist with doctoral and postdoctoral training in computational neuroscience, investigating language processing in the human brain (EEG/MEG) and in artificial cognitive systems (language models). He is an advocate of open science and maintains an interest in public interest technology and civic tech. He currently helps building the CIB Mango Tree project, an interactive open source tool for analyses of social media datasets.
Session
Most scientific python maintainers build for users who will pip install the code. In civic tech, your community members are policy researchers, journalists, or NGO advocates who may never touch a Python environment. This cross-disciplinary context changes maintainership: traditional open source practices serve double duty as engineering and social infrastructure. I'll share lessons learned in maintaining the CIB Mango Tree, a civic tech Python toolkit for detecting inauthentic behavior in social media. I’ll show how in civic tech context familiar practices, like release cycles and continuous integration, can be repurposed to surface the otherwise invisible developer work to the broader community.