ml5.js is a beginner-friendly open-source machine learning library focused on making machine learning tools more approachable for a broad audience of artists, educators, creative coders, and others. As a maintainer of the library, my goal is to contribute a variety of improvements to the ml5.js core library that are focused on improving stability and addressing community needs. I believe that these changes help to make ml5.js more accessible to a wider variety of contributors and creators.

I’ve learned that open source is a durational practice rather than a momentary one. Strong open-source communities and the technologies that enable them are products of commitment and responsibility. Every contribution that ml5.js has received is an instance of someone taking the responsibility to share their time and energy with the broader community. As maintainers, I believe we have a responsibility to honor those contributions through our commitments to the future of the library and, most importantly, to the people who comprise our open-source community. In practice, I believe that this looks like writing clear documentation for our tools and ideas, seeing our changes through to the end, asking for lots of help from the community, and supporting all types of contributions.

I discussed some of my goals from 2020 in an interview with Johanna Hedva for Processing Foundation. You can stay up to date with the project through the ml5-library GitHub repo.