← All posts

Ambuba Q4 Plan

Created 2 years ago

Q3 in review

Over the past three months, more and more people have learned about Ambuda:

I’m utterly impressed with this project and the sheer quality of its execution. I’ve dreamed about a tool like this for over a decade and you’re leading this effort far better than I ever could.

The site is beautiful and very intuitive/user-friendly. The one-click de-sandhi-ing + the one-click parses/definitions are so slick. […] everything here is just so clean/smart."

This new Ambuda site is amazing ! Great job ! I look forward to see it grow. It is much better than any Skt site i have seen.

I don’t think it gets better than this — actually, it will get better than this, but I feel this is what it should all culminate into.

Our breakthrough library now contains 18 texts, 12 of which have clickable word meanings. Readers can look up these words in one of 9 integrated dictionaries that together support 4 different languages. Our site interface has become multilingual as well, and it now has strong support for Sanskrit, Marathi, and Telugu.

In addition, we built and launched a new proofing tool that has rapidly become the best and easiest way to convert scanned Sanskrit books into machine-readable text. Already, more than 25 contributors have already made more than 1200 edits through our system.

On the software side, we grew our technical platform to make it substantially others for others to contribute to our work, and we have been fortunate to receive technical contributions from 10 different people so far. In addition, we have found two promising Sanskrit parsing tools and are exploring new working relationships with researchers in India. I’ll say more about this work in a future update.

As for our team, Ambuda now has a group of around a dozen people who regularly contribute to project discussions and other work related to the project. More formally, our core team has grown to include four members: myself, Suhas Mahesh, Ashwin Ramaswami, and Kishore Chitrapu. I am also pleased to share that Bibek Debroy has agreed to be an advisor to Ambuda.

Finally, Ambuda has received more than ₹1,60,000 ($2,000) in donations, all of which will be vital as we continue to grow.

Overall, we have met almost all of our Q3 goals. The main exception, however, is that our library of 18 texts is much smaller than the 108 we had originally planned.

Why did we miss our goal here? There are three reasons:

  1. To give people a meaningful way to contribute non-technically, I spent a substantial amount of time building and refining the proofing interface.

  2. To help onboard others and grow the technical team, I spent a substantial amount of time on outreach, documentation, and testing.

  3. Due to various life obligations, I had to take some time off from the project. During this time, technical contributors were unable to deploy any changes.

All of these reasons have the same the root cause: dependence on a single person.

Our advisors have told us that for Ambuda to succeed long-term, we must avoid dependence on a single person. So as we continue to the end of the year, I want to focus on building systems to reduce this weakness. When these systems are firmly in place, Ambuda will be poised for incredible growth.

Our mission

Ambuda’s mission is to make the Sanskrit tradition radically accessible. Specifically, we have three goals:

  1. Create a complete archive of traditional Sanskrit literature
  2. Publish this archive in an open format.
  3. Integrate this archive with intelligent tools for students and scholars.

The theme of this quarter is systems. In a sentence, my goal is to build systems that let the entire project run even if I am unavaialble.

A complete archive

By the end of Q4, Ambuda will have:

  • a simple user interface for adding new texts to the library.
  • an end-to-end interface for converting PDFs into library texts.
  • support for adding translations, commentaries, and audio to an existing text.
  • support for displaying multiple editions of a given text.

The main roadblack to adding texts is that our process is highly manual and requires some technical skill. As much as possible, I want to eliminate the work required to add a new text to the library.

I likewise want to do the same for translations, commentaries, and audio, none of which we support currently. All three of these resources are tremendously useful and help us provide a much richer experience for our users.

Editions are important because different communities often prefer different editions of a text. Ambuda should serve the needs of all of these communities impartially.

Once these systems are in place, we can rapidly add all of these resources to Ambuda.

An open format

By the end of Q4, Ambuda will support downloading texts as XML files and PDFs.

Ambuda is committed to open data and open access. But the longer we go without making our resources easy to download, the more difficult it is to add that functionality later. At a minimum, Ambuda will let users download the raw XML files that we use to create our reader. In addition, we will also support simple PDF downloads so that it is easier to read these texts offline.

Intelligent tools

By the end of Q4, Ambuda will have:

  • an online tool that parses arbitrary Sanskrit.
  • an interface for creating and correcting parse data for Sanskrit texts.

At our current size, Ambuda’s distinguishing feature is its one-click word analysis. To extend this feature to every text on our library, we will continue to invest in our tooling here and build a simple interface for parsing texts and correcting parse data.

Our team

In addition to direct work on our mission, we will also make the Ambuda team stronger and more resilient.

Community

By the end of Q4, Ambuda will have clear community guidelines that our contributors accept by consensus.

Our community is growing, and we need to broadly agree on how we should communicate with each other effectively. Our guidelines should be lightweight and welcoming while also setting clear rules that we can all accept and follow.

Legal

By the end of Q4, Ambuda will have a clear plan for being recognized as a non-profit organization.

Ambuda is a non-profit in spirit but not in law. Legal recognition has substantial benefits for the project:

  • We will receive substantial discounts on the technology we will need as we grow, including email and cloud services.

  • We will have a credible process for handling donations responsibly.

  • We will have a credible process for appointing a new project lead in case I am no longer able to serve in that capacity.

In short, the benefit is that we will become a much more credible group.

I am new to this process and don’t know how long it takes. So, my focus is on creating a strategy and timeline here.

Donations

By the end of Q4, Ambuda will accept international donations and have a much better user experience for requesting and receiving donations.

The easiest way to scale our proofing effort is to hire proofreaders directly. To do so effectively, we need to raise more money and make it easier for others to donate to Ambuda.

Closing thoughts

Our plans for this quarter focus heavily on internal concerns. But by making the bones of our project stronger, we will be well positioned for the future.

Our work is just beginning. Thank you for supporting Ambuda, and please contact us if you would like to help in any capacity.

Arun Prasad

1 October 2022

Appendix: Funds as of 2022-10-01

Our expenses so far have been low. But once we start scaling our proofing effort, our expenses will increase greatly. I’m planning to hold a 1 year reserve for website costs (around $250) and use the rest to hire proofreaders.

Income:

  • $2264.44 (PayPal donations)

Costs:

  • $9.16 (ambuda.org 1-year registration)
  • $75.80 (ambuda.org 5-year renewal)
  • $7.98 (ambuda.in 1-year registration)
  • $9.81 (DigitalOcean hosting, June 2022)
  • $12.00 (DigitalOcean hosting, July 2022)
  • $12.00 (DigitalOcean hosting, August 2022)
  • $12.00 (DigitalOcean hosting, September 2022)
  • $0.02 (AWS storage, August 2022)
  • $0.02 (AWS storage, September 2022)
  • $1.53 (Google Cloud API, September 2022)
  • $0.33 (Plausible analytics, June 2022)
  • $0.62 (Plausible analytics, July 2022)
  • $1.02 (Plausible analytics, August 2022)
  • $1.05 (Plausible analytics, September 2022)

Funds remaining: $2121.10

Notes:

  • Our Plausible plan is shared across multiple projects, including learnsanskrit.org. It is billed at $96.00 per year, or the equivalent of $8.00 per month, with a monthly quota of 100k views. Ambuda’s monthly page views are 4.1k (June), 7.7k (July), 12.7k (August), and 13.1k (September), which yield prorated costs of $0.33, $0.62, $1.02, and $1.05.