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Newsletter #5 (December 2020)

Hello from Codidact!  We have lots of news about our organization, our communities, software updates, and some award nominations.

## Organization

We are delighted to announce that The Codidact Foundation is now a recognized non-profit organization! We've incorporated in the UK as a Community Interest Company (CIC), a type of corporation that, by law, must operate for the public good. Income is reinvested in the organization; there are no shareholders nor private benefit. We’ve always been committed to being a non-profit; this makes it official.

While we’d like to be recognized as a charity (which comes with additional benefits for donors and the Foundation), the process can take quite a while. Forming a CIC was a relatively quick first step that lets us get officially up and running while we pursue charity status. We can now open a bank account, use it to pay expenses (instead of using people's personal credit cards), and (soon) accept donations. We don't have the bank account set up just yet (it turns out that the pandemic slowed banks down too); as soon as we do we'll add a "donate" button on our site and announce it on our blog.

You can learn more about our corporate setup and next steps [on our blog](https://meta.codidact.com/articles/279384).


## Community news

We recently celebrated Codidact's first birthday with a small contest.  41 members of our communities won prizes (we'll be contacting you shortly about delivery).  Congratulations to all of them, and in particular to our top three winners: Moshi, Lundin, and Olin Lathrop.  The full list is on our [leaderboard](https://meta.codidact.com/birthday/ranking).

We've recently added two new communities to our network:

- [Code Golf](https://codegolf.codidact.com) is for everyone interested in recreational coding.  Every programmer can reverse a string, but can you do it in 20 bytes of code?  How about 10?  How about 3?  Do you enjoy other coding competitions like King of the Hill?  Check out the challenges on this community -- all experience levels and all programming languages are welcome.

- [Christianity](https://christianity.codidact.com) is for anyone practicing, studying, or interested in Christianity and its sacred texts.  Questions about specific traditions, questions about theology, questions about how certain approaches or hermeneutics interpret the bible -- all are welcome.

We have active proposals for several other communities.  This is great -- we look forward to growing together!  One thing we have learned is that we need to provide better tools for people organizing proposals, particularly for figuring out how many people are actively interested in helping to build a community here.  We do not want to stand in the way of a group of people who want to build something great on our network -- and we also want to help new communities thrive, which is hard to do when there are few participants.  We're all learning together, and we're working on some ideas to bring to the community for discussion.


## Platform news

At long last, we have made the switch from reputation-based privileges to activity-based abilities.  You will now gain abilities like editing or handling certain flags based on your track record in related activities.  We described this change in more detail in [our previous newsletter](https://meta.codidact.com/articles/278715).

This was the largest single update we've made, with major changes both in the code and in the database.  Our rollout was rockier than we had expected, and we apologize for that.  We are working on a plan to improve our server architecture, and we've learned some lessons that we can apply next time.  We plan to share what we learned from this experience on our blog.

We've also addressed a slew of smaller change requests, bugs, and annoyances.  Flags, the user profile page, and the sign-up process got makeovers.  We added a "table of contents" to questions, so you can see a summary of the answers right up top -- we were going to do this anyway, and then the Code Golf community explained how critical this is for them, so we bumped it up in priority.  We've also added support for tables in the editor.

Our team of developers is growing, but we're still a small team.  You don't have to be an expert to help; our developers are happy to guide and mentor new team members, and our tech lead, luap42, has even done some coding sessions via Twitch.  If you know some Ruby, or you know some programming and want to *learn* Ruby, you can drop into our [project Discord server](https://discord.gg/7jf8UzS) or comment on any post on our [blog](https://meta.codidact.com/categories/30) and we'll get you set up.  Or visit our [main GitHub repository](https://github.com/codidact/qpixel) -- feel free to browse the open issues and the code.


## Award nominations

CMX is an organization for community managers and related professionals.  CMX provides resources to help community managers help their communities to thrive.  They held a recent online conference that several of us on the Codidact team attended.

Voting is currently open for this year's CMX Community Industry Awards, to celebrate those communities and individuals that are innovating and demonstrating resilience.  We are delighted that Codidact has received two nominations:

- We have been nominated in the "Community: Product and Ideation" category, specifically for how we work together on Meta.

- Our community lead, Monica Cellio, has been nominated individually in the "Professional: Nonprofit Community" category.

[Public voting is open](https://awards.cmxhub.com) until December 16.  The votes will determine finalists in each category, from which CMX will choose winners.  Codidact is young and going up against some established communities, but we make up for our youth with drive and resilience.  We're honored to be considered for these awards.


## In closing

Thank you for your continued support of Codidact and our communities.  We've had a great first year and we look forward to new features, new communities and participants, and new team members in our second year and beyond.

The Codidact Team  
https://codidact.org