Impact Framework Project Updates 2024-09-26

## Who

Sponsor: @jawache (GSF)
Product owner: @jmcook1186 (GSF)
Leads: @navveenb (Accenture), @srini1978 (Microsoft)

## Overview

This past fortnight has seen lot of work on the IF visualizer, which is now live and available here:

https://if-visualizer.vercel.app/

You can try it out by passing the url for a raw manifest.

The manifest is really useful because it provides an accessible entry point into analyzing a manifest without having to jump right into the yaml file. You can interrogate the time series plot and find individual entries in the table, while the flyout tab let's you examine the data for each cell. If you want the lowest level details, there's a tab to see the raw file.

This has already become a very useful onboarding and communication tool, and I can only see it being used more and mroe from here. Big thank you to @osamajandali for doing all the front end development on this!

We've also been doing some refactoring of the iF source code in the background, tidying things up so that they are easier to maintain and also making it easier for plugin builders to access all the IF features. Mostly, this has been a process of moving common functions into a package called `if-core` which you simply install as a dependency in your plugin.

Aside from that, we've started refreshing the docs again, but this time we're really focusing in on providing practical advice for how to write manifests. getting this right will probably take a bit of time, and we're eager to hear any feedback you might have.

Also shoutout to @mouhamadalmounayar for helping us improve our time-sync plugin. His changes have helped us to circumvent the need to resample down to 1 second intervals when we snap to a new time grid.

Finally, we have been creating manifest files! I attempted to capture the SCI score for our GSF website in a manifest file and also started working on the IF docs website, an LCA for the IF project and a manifest for a hypothetical Zoom call. These are al in the `if-db` repository and you are encouraged to scrutinize them and suggest improvements, or add new manifests for other projects!

@jawache and I have also been giving talks and attending meetups, promoting IF and SCI.

Cheers!

## Issues

We have had a good fortnight, with no notable blockers.

## Outlook

- Finish refactoring
- Docs updates
- Visualizer refinements