CSF's quarterly report (April – June 2025)

Team milestones

Stabilisation of most team units, establishment of the Archives Unit, establishment of the Wikipedia Strategic Development Unit.

Completed

Two new units were established this quarter.

In May, the Archives Unit was established, which at that time consisted of only one member. Its task is to preserve as many of our scientists' works as possible that are at risk of being lost. They aim to find and digitise little-known and forgotten scientific publications, scan databases, and restore historical justice. Their first task is to upload all publicly available works by Ukrainian astronomers.

The Wikipedia Strategic Growth Unit was established in June with the aim of scaling up our teamwork experience in the Ukrainian-language section of Wikipedia. The department is also small, with only three people at the time of its formation. They began their work with an analytical study entitled ‘Why Wikipedians stop editing Wikipedia’ with the aim of identifying key problems in our language section and assessing the resources we can count on to scale up our experience.

The Scientific Unit successfully completed the second round of Star Hunters and started the third one. Two scientific papers on the discovered variable stars – from TESS-UA-2024 and the first Star Hunters – were submitted to professional journals for review. In total, within the framework of these two projects, about 260 new variable stars were found.

The Educational Unit finally completed the long-suffering Variable Stars Lectures course. In addition, a mini-course consisting of three lectures on Microsoft Word and Excel was recorded for participants in scientific projects. Our experience proved that basic skills in working with spreadsheets and text documents remain a challenge for most participants. The mini-course provides the necessary minimum knowledge and allows new and existing participants to work more efficiently with documentation.

The Wikipedian Unit has developed a new methodology for writing Featured Lists, one of the three types of articles of the highest quality on Wikipedia. We managed to reduce the writing time for a typical list from 10-20 hours to 1-4 hours. Thanks to the ease of scaling, we managed to write 6 Featured Lists in a few weeks. Combined with those written earlier, at that point, almost every second Featured List that received status during 2025 was authored by us.

The Unit of Communications focused on two main projects: organising Astro Classes and holding our second offline event in Odesa. The goal of Astro Classes is to attract more participants to our scientific projects and team by giving lectures in schools. The Astro Classes themselves are scheduled for October 2025.

The IT Unit developed a number of programmes for scientific projects, including code to check whether a variable star could be a pulsating one. The unit's team also helped to automate a number of other processes within the team.

Not completed

Although the Variable Stars Lectures course was recorded, it took so long that by the time it was ready, it was no longer really needed. Due to management chaos, a lack of people, the irresponsibility of some participants, poor communication, and outright stupidity, the recording of the course took 22 months instead of the planned 3-4. This disrupted our future plans in several units at once, led to the cancellation of very important projects, and effectively destroyed the morale of the Educational Unit team.

The Analytical Unit was going through a difficult period for a number of reasons, including management chaos. During those three months, there were numerous cases of duplication of tasks and re-execution of tasks that had already been completed, and a number of errors were found in the results, which had to be redone later.

The HR Unit experienced a significant shortage of people, which slowed down the recruitment process and caused significant delays. Active interaction with team members began, but at that time it was not systematic and was more like firefighting in those units where there were significant problems.

Conclusions

Overall, the period can be characterised as a combination of real progress and overcoming internal challenges: despite management failures, a lack of resources and the overload of certain areas, the team maintained its pace of development and expanded its structure. The results achieved created a clear foundation for further growth, and the problems identified outlined the areas on which to focus efforts in the next quarter.