The EagerEyes Labs' mission is to provide tools to gain insight into relevant data to everybody. As part of that, the plan has always been to release the source code. The first piece of code is now published, and more is coming.

I am starting with the most rec ent, the Presidential Demographics applet. It is available as a project on Launchpad, where you can download it from the downloads tab. The file is an Eclipse project that you can import directly into Eclipse or use the contained source files with any other Java IDE.

For revision control, I use Bazaar, which is a distributed version control system (it's named after the influential essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar on open source development models). The files for that are included (in the .bzr directory), and you can also checkout or branch the project directly from Launchpad. There is also an Eclipse plugin for Bazaar. Bazaar's great advantage is that it allows for a more decentralized style of development, which is typical for open source projects. So several people can work on the project independently and merge their changes in any way they see fit, without being tied to a central "master" repository.

This particular applet may not lend itself to massive distributed development, but perhaps somebody will find it useful. And there are more complex things coming that will perhaps lead to some community development.

I am currently reworking the code for the ZIPScribble Maps, and am planning on releasing that once it's in better shape (and depends on fewer external libraries). Future applets (and there are more in the works) will be published with source as much as possible.

Nathan of Flowing Data recently wrote a posting on open source and the question how "open" we should be. I couldn't help but write in a comment that releasing your code should be a condition for publication. It's really unconscionable that we as academics sit on our code rather than sharing and building on it. So here's a first step in that direction.