Hi there! My name is Oreoluwa, from Nigeria. I am an Outreachy intern at Creative Commons for the December 2025 cohort. My project involves improving and expanding Quantifying the commons. In this post, I will share my progress and key takeaways from the first half of my internship.

Project overview

Quantifying the commons aims to track and analyse the trends of the creative commons legal tools. Who is using these legal tools, where, why, how? We want to measure the impact of these tools. For the past 25 years, efforts have been made by the organisation to democratize knowledge and content on the internet. We want to identify our growth, gaps and areas for development.

A brief history I learnt about

After watching a documentary recommended by my mentor. I learnt about a great man called Aaron Schwartz who is also known as internet's own boy. He believed knowledge should be free and accessible to everyone. His ideas helped inspire movements like Creative Commons, which allows creators to share their work legally while choosing how others can use it. I resonate well with this movement because I realised how much knowledge I have gained from reading articles and my random searches on the internet. I feel really excited to be contributing to this mission.

Progress so far

Aligning the project better to the script requirements

One of the main script requirement is making the script repeatable

We use Github Actions to automate our python script on a quarterly basis. So there is an execution schedule that runs for 45 days or less. For better efficiency, scripts must exit early if a task is already completed and must reliably continue at the appropriate spot if multiple runs are required and not completed. Multiple runs in the sense that some of the APIs we integrate to fetch data have their limitations that allow a certain amount of fetch per hour or day. So we continue to fetch after the specified hour or day. During my work on the project, I implemented a mechanism that checks for completion of fetch scripts and allows the script to continue from when it stops during any interruption. I integrated a workflow that checks if an output has been generated previously to avoid regeneration or running of script continuously, when we have an output already.

Another script requirement is making the script idempotent

Making the script idempotent means executing the python scripts multiple times and still get the same output. Before my work on the project, the report scripts usually append it sections to the readme using the update_readme() function and this allows the order of outputs to change. For example when I run a script, I can get A-B-C but when I run it again maybe in the next quarter. I could get B-C-A, we don't want it like that. It should be predictable and consistent across quarters. But now,it inserts the sections alphabetically to the right position regardless of how the python scripts were executed. So we get A-B-C in quarter 1 and A-B-C in quarter 2.

Documentation on the project

Improving contributors experience is a big part of the project. During the Outreachy contribution phase, new contributors kept on asking the same questions over and over again because there were some lack of information in the documentation. Timid Robot and I tried to identify areas that were lacking clarity and we put in more context into the sides of the documentation.

Completing the three stages of report for existing scripts

Previous contributions had incomplete stages of report for a particular data source. I worked on completing the process and report stage for the Openverse data source. This required understanding the data fetched and what meaningful data or insight can be beneficial for the different teams in the organisation.

Current status

I am currently working on completing the process and report stage for other data sources. Then I expand the project by adding new data sources for reporting. An iterative task for me is to check for areas in the code that might need improvement or better ways of doing things in the codebase.

Collaboration with mentors

My favorite part of this project is my weekly meetup with my mentors, I get to ask questions, get ideas on ways I could improve something or solve a problem. I also get to review work done by my mentors, which allows me to learn from their approaches and imbibe them into my contributions.

Key takeways

Open source has been one of the coolest experiences in my tech journey. It has helped me expand my skill set, as I picked up new programming languages along the way. I learned to easily identify optimal solutions, especially when working within constraints or limitations that could affect outcomes. Through this, I realized the importance of building the simplest possible architecture first, and then gradually adding components as the solution evolves.

I am excited to embark on the next half! I hope to make more impact on this project.