Hi there,

I'm one of the co founders of Serenata de Amor and your reply was very interesting for us. It pushed the core team (me included) to rethink our steps. If you had time for such a substantial critique I hope you have time to hear our side of the story. It's not about antagonizing you, but giving our point of view might help people understand why things were done the way they are.

First of all, yes, we want publicity. We depend on that actually. We set up a crowd funding campaign to be able to raise funds and work full time on the project for a couple of months. If we reach our target it will mean 8 people working full time during on it, for two months. People who have quit their jobs and still have bills to pay. So yes, publicity is good for us. And publicity is good for the project — that's what we hope, at least.

Furthermore we aim at publicity among a diverse public. Corruption is not an issue relevant only for the tech community, thus we don't intend to reach only developers and data scientists. We want journalists to know what we are doing, we want general public interested in politics and civil participation to know what we are doing, we want people looking for justice to know what we are doing, we want politically skeptical people to know what we are doing. And we do not have a website (yet). So our choice was to go for a non-techical REAMDE.md and keep the technical stuff and contribution guide in a separate document, the CONTRIBUTING.md. And even that one is not 100% focused on tech people, because the project don't depend exclusively on tech people — we need creative social scientists to draw hypothesis, we need people with law expertise to help us handling the “interesting” stories we might find, we need communication experts to make press releases so news outlet might help us in putting pressure over politicians, and so on.

Furthermore, we are open to talk. We are not a closed group, we have no hierarchy, no dictators and not even a BDFL. That's why we publicize about our social media. We want people to know what we are doing and we want people to reach us whenever they want, using the communication platforms they use.

So, yes. I do agree with your most sharp critiques. Zero technical info in the README.md? Sure thing: journalists might not be interested on that and we want them to follow the project. Are we trying to get publicity? Sure thing: we actually are trying to be able to work full time on that thing for 2 months and we will still have bills to pay — just like everybody else. Not 100% technical? Sure thing: we cannot be 100% technical and let the publicity out of it since our project requires other sets of expertise.

And still: we hope that this does not invalidades our claims that we are using machine learning to fight corruption in Brazil.

Finally, Data Science Brigade. This is an organization we started to help creating and fostering the culture of data science in Brazil, specially among journalists. Yes, there are interests underneath it (spoiler, there's no such a thing as non-interested action): we work with that stuff and we want to have jobs in this field in the near future. Also we are Brazilians and we want to have here the kind of serious journalism focused on data we see in the US, for example. We believe this is good for the society we live in and we believe we can help with that — so, why not?

These are our thoughts, the reasons why underneath the stack you are criticizing. Maybe we got it wrong — and we do apologize if that's the case. But by now we must say that we are confident that things are bringing good results, both in terms of technical contribution and in terms of publicity.

Once more, many thank for the sharp and straightforward criticism. People not always have the balls to say what they think — and we value your courage to do so. Unfortunately we may disagree on some points, because I'm afraid we do need publicity and non-techincal people. I don't expect you to agree with us, but maybe this helps you (and others) to understand why our entry points are non-technical and welcoming lay people in general. And if you like, you (and others) may make your self at home as tech-savvy on CONTRIBUTING.md, Issues and Pull Requests, and on Gitter and Telegram too.