Like many developers, we often contribute to open-source software in bits and pieces over long periods of time. So we started the Open-Source Retreat to help open-source developers make concentrated progress on features and releases with the potential for significant impact.

For 2016’s Retreat, we’re inviting three developers to work on their projects from Stripe’s office in SF:

• Nik Graf will be working on Belle, a configurable component library for React that is focused on great user experience, accessibility, and compatibility across devices and browsers. Developers still tend to build the same set of components from scratch for web frameworks like React, Ember, and Angular—and often without considering compatibility or UX issues. We’re excited to see Nik expand the number of components for Belle and improve their usability and accessibility during the Retreat.
• Christopher Allan Webber wants to launch federation tooling for MediaGoblin, a free software media platform that anyone can run. Think of it as a decentralized alternative to major media publishing services such as Flickr, YouTube, SoundCloud, DeviantArt, etc. We’re huge fans of the federated web and would like to see more software in that space. We see MediaGoblin as more than just a way to share media, but a reference application for building on new, emerging standards, such as the ActivityPump API.
• Pascal Brandt’s focus will be on OpenMRS, a platform that’s widely used to support the delivery of health care in Africa and developing countries. The introduction of a REST API in their latest version has contributed to an explosion in new front-ends being built atop their medical recording system framework. Pascal hopes to create a single, authoritative JavaScript client for OpenMRS.

Though there were many more applicants than we could host, we’d like to thank everyone who applied. We’d also especially like to recognize our finalists:

• Doron Somech: A proposal to bring NetMQ to feature parity with ZeroMQ.
• Alan Guo Xiang Tan: Improvements to backfilling and automated regression identification for RubyBench, which provides benchmarking for Ruby and Rails.
• Anne Ogborn Writing the authoritative book for programming in SWI-Prolog.
• Nyah Check: A module for OpenMRS that would help migrate existing databases to OpenMRS.
• Naomi Most: Metapub, a Python library that unites the National Library of Medicine databases with CrossRef metadata search to improve search, text-mining, and cross-referencing for academic articles.

We encourage you to explore (and contribute to!) these projects.

Our three grantees will be working on their proposed projects starting in January and they’ll share their work towards the end of the Retreat. In the meantime, if you have any questions or suggestions, please let us know!