## What We’re Doing

**Our proposal to the Sloan Foundation was funded!** This means we’ve got 2 years of support to work on integrating a bunch of new data, automation of our ETL pipeline, and improving access to the results, some of which we outlined in our [2021 infrastructure roadmap](/content/2020/11/16/pudl-infrastructure-roadmap-2021/index.html). In combination with the client work we’ve been engaged in, this means we’ll need to recruit a new member to the co-op. We’re trying to figure out what skills and experience we are actually short on, relative to what we need to get done.

**We continue to update our documentation**, as we prepare for a new software and data release. A lot of it is related to the development environment, contributing, and how to run the ETL as it is now, while the user-facing side of the docs will hopefully be much simpler, directing folks to use preprocessed data with a Docker image that’s available on Zenodo, or **[our JupyterHub](https://catalyst-cooperative.pilot.2i2c.cloud/)**, or **[Datasette](https://data.catalyst.coop/)**. We’ve set a deadline for the release of April 19th, which is also our next **[Advisory Board](/content/advisory-board/index.html)** meeting.

**We decided to simplify our branch management on GitHub**. Instead of having separate ephemeral sprint branches, we’re just branching off of and making PRs against `dev`, and merging back into `main` after each 2 week long sprint, which seems to be far more common among open source projects, and is a lot less to try and keep track of. It should also mean we don’t have to re-direct lingering PRs to different base branches.

**Data Wrangling Galore:** Austen has been cleaning up the FERC Form 1 fuel table to capture previously discarded records that need information from other rows to make sense. Christina continues to work on estimating plant operating costs based on FERC+EIA linkages we’ve developed for RMI, and still need to merge into the main PUDL repo. Zane is trying to make our unit and prime-mover level heat rate estimates more robust and complete.

- Tags [branch management](/content/tag/branch-management/index.html), [documentation](/content/tag/documentation/index.html), [metascience](/content/tag/metascience/index.html), [Sloan Foundation](/content/tag/sloan-foundation/index.html), [SOLID design](/content/tag/solid-design/index.html)