Talk:Summer of Content projects

This page is for brainstorming and comments about Summer of Content project ideas. Add your thoughts!

If you think an idea is good enough or well developed enough (it has a basic description, an explanation why it's important, and examples of clear deliverables), propose it as a formal project. To create a formal project proposal, see the Summer of Content projects page.

What makes a good project proposal?

Starting a list - not a binding thing or a judging criteria, but perhaps some good general suggestions from people who have written project proposals before. Please help add things! Mchua 04:14, 21 July 2007 (EDT)

• Clearly stated goal. - Otherwise known as a thesis statement... what are you trying to do, and why should we care about it?
• Demonstrated feasibility. - Can you do it in the set amount of time with the number of people and the amount of funding you have (and still retain your sanity)? Prove it. A project plan helps a lot with this.
• Know your competition. - Have others done this in the past? (If yes, who are they? If no, why not - why would nobody have solved this problem before?)

translations table

need a way to facilitate moving between languages on really good project ideas. Mchua 21:42, 24 July 2007 (EDT)

Category	Project name	Translations	existing translations
General category	Name of the project / main wikipage	English	{{:main_wikipage/translations}}
Art	OLPC webcomic	english	OLPC webcomic/translations
Accessibility	WikiTranscript	english	WikiTranscript/translations
Community-building	OLPC volunteers portal	english	Wiki Family Tree/translations
Education	Learning4Content	english	Learning4Content/translations

Some ideas from a 1cc brainstorm

• Stories: Shoot a short documentary film on what life is like for schoolchildren in your village
• How-tos: Make how-to videos on playing regional sports, musical instruments, etc.
• Food: Add recipes from your region to the Wikibooks Cookbook
• More food: Create a cooking game like to Cooking Mama, except with localized, user-provided recipes.
• Classroom activities: Create some constructionist learning activities.
• Language learning: Contribute video, translations, &c to Colingo.org
• Use the photo option to create a geometrical scrapbook
• Collaborate with class(es) around the world to share customs and traditions.
• Collaborate with class(es) to interview local leaders and share ideas about leadership. What makes a leader? Is that different across cultures?
• Collaborate with class(es) in other countries to share book reviews (can be online books, too.)
• Use a wiki to collect the collaborative content.
• Create a collaborative blog or journal to document how the laptop and technology has changed the way children learn (whether in a small village in Nigeria or a large western urban "village".)

The line between SOC projects and developer projects...

Ive observed many people with a strong technical background propose projects. IMHO i've observed some of those projects would fall more into the conventional "developer" projects rather than Summer of Content i.e. content focussed projects. Of course every activity that is developed has a lot of potential to have content developed around it, but the focus of summer of content is content rather than activity development, right ?

One suggestion could be to create a separate category under which people with good scripting/programming skills can list themselves and if some content project requires the use of such skills (which I believe many content projects would require), the corresponding people can be contacted.

Thoughts ?

--Arjs 11:17, 26 August 2007 (EDT)

skills needed vs helpers available

Not sure which one of these two things are what you meant above.

1. Have a way to tag projects with "required skills/attributes for interns" - for instance, speaking spanish, living in uruguay, being able to teach a classroom of small children. One such tag (or set of tags) would be "scripting/programming experience." SoCon interns could then look for projects they fit the criteria for.
2. Have people who want to code not join the pool of Socon interns, but instead list themselves in a separate group on the website as "people who are willing to help content interns with small bits of code they need completed."

Mchua 14:13, 26 August 2007 (EDT)

re: skills needed vs helpers available

Whatever you adopt, the essential thing is that a database is there of people with scripting skills which is, unlike knowing Spanish or living in Uruguay, a universal skill applicable to all projects. My aim is to attract more of content related proposals rather than developer proposals by making such a distinction clear.

--Arjs 14:26, 26 August 2007 (EDT)