Summer of Content 2008 Proposals

This is an interim proposals page for the few weeks before the Summer of Content (SoCon) application site goes live.

Use the template below to add your project proposals to this page. Remember that a SoCon project term is 10 weeks long, usually full-time split between one or more contributors. If you leave us with a way to contact you (under "interested people" for each project - wiki user talk pages are great), we'll contact you when the new site is launched and help you port your application there.

Template

Description

A description of the project you're proposing. What are the project's goals? Its motivations (why is this important?) What will be its end deliverables? What skills and/or equipment will be needed to do this project - what are the prerequisite skills and knowledge should the interns working on this project have, what kind of tools or access will they need, and how will these resources be provided?

 This summer I am scheduled to take part on a 10 day trip to help build facilities at an orphanage 

in Peru. This is an annual event. Last year we were in the Andes for 10 days making adobe bricks

for an orphanage.  This year we we will be helping build facilities in the Amazon village of 

Puerto Alegria. Our trips are self funded with some help from fund raisers and family. We use our

vacation for time on.  Our group is 18 people but we schedule with other groups from areas of the 

US and Europe. In addition to working at the facilities we bring clothes, food, and anything else that we can get.

 Our group has some technology savvy people that could extend our activities to this program.  I 

was wondering if we could obtain some laptops from the One Laptop Per Child program. Each orphanage contains school facilities but there are no computers or technology at all. Our group is

willing to transport the laptops on our way to Peru.

Sincerely, Robert (Bob) Dellago rdellag@nortel.com

Discussion

Start some discussion about your proposal here - what questions remain to be worked out? What problems might it hit? What things about the project proposal could be improved? What resources might you pull for it? What people and organizations might it be good to get in touch with? Encourage others to contribute to this section (or contribute to this section, if you're not the original proposal author!)

Interested people

This is a place where people interested in the project can sign up for updates.

• Your name and contact info, and the role you're interested in playing (sponsor, mentor, intern)
• More names and contact info, and the role they're interested in playing (sponsor, mentor, intern)

Multilingual wiki

Description

The OLPC wiki is a respectably-sized mediawiki-based wiki with multilingual content. As deployment continues, it will only get more so. A good multilingual infrastructure for this wiki is IMO possible to implement in the time frame of one Summer of Content internship (for one or two people working together).

Discussion

Comments are of course welcome.

Tentative roadmap

• SMW

• Help install the Semantic Mediawiki (SMW) extension to Mediawiki for the OLPC wiki.
• Optional: also install the Halo extension for greater usability of SMW.
• Rework the translation infrastructure to take advantage of SMW features

• Fix {{translation}}, {{translations}}, {{translationlist}}, and related templates to use multiple categories like spanish, translation in progress, translated from english, instead of composite categories.

• While you're at it, modularise templates for readability

• Optional: rework the activities page to use SMW inline-query features for the activity list. (This enables language versions of the activities list to stay up-to-date.)
• Optional: use SMW queries to create a {{ll}} language-link template which queries the current page language, detects if the link target exists in that language, and depending on that links to the target in that language or in its original language.
• An importance/quality rating scale for translations (optional: using a template on the original page which detects missing translations for important languages for important pages)

• Document your work

• Insofar as possible, the templates should show brief appropriate instructions when they detect a problem (this work is already started).
• These instructions should link to more detailed instruction pages. Existing instructions need to be simplified without losing content.
• Translate/manage translation of documentation into one target language.
• Create pages with inline SMW queries to help keep track of work needed.

• Make a first pass at redoing existing pages to use the new infrastructure

• Ideally use a mediawiki bot to support, but manual intervention will be needed.
• Not necessary to clean up every last remnant, but the main core for the target language should be covered.
• Existing translations without /lang-xx names should get /lang-xx redirects pointing to them.

• (this does not assume that source language is always English, by the way)

• Code multilingual extension to mediawiki so that es.wiki.laptop.org (for example) can be a Spanish entry point to the same database of wiki pages.

• To fix the top bar (tabs and login) is probably an easy chore, involving replacing static checks of the language variable with a function.
• Make the language variable from the URL available to javascript, css, and wiki functions (as a parser function). This is probably a bit more work and some of it is optional. Hacks are acceptable if they work. (This is the one step I am not qualified to mentor -Homunq 13:24, 2 March 2008 (EST))
• To fix the sidebar requires translation, evaluation of available content, and using the results of the above work.

• extra points if the sidebars can be edited from within the wiki by users with the right privileges.

• optional: create a multi-redirect functionality that gives automatic disambiguation using the URL variable for collisions in language names of a page (eg, OLPC, or spanish-portuguese overlaps).

Skill set needed

The team of one or two people should cover the following skill set:

• some PHP experience and willingness to learn more
• Ability to work with complicated, conditional mediawiki templates (see an example)
• Desirable: ability to modify the Mediawiki bot template (in Python, Ruby, Java, or whatever...) to help with recategorizing
• clear writing style, willingness to spend time on documentation
• decent English and fluent in at least one OLPC target language. Preferably Spanish or Portuguese, also Ethiopian, Afghani, Thai, Indian, or Mongolian languages (Amharic, Dari, Pashto, etc. Heck, if I'm dreaming, why not Quechua).

Interested people

This is a place where people interested in the project can sign up for updates.

• I could serve as a mentor for everything except the optional PHP step. For that, if there is a Summer of Code person on Mediawiki stuff, they could help with the mentoring. Homunq 13:24, 2 March 2008 (EST) ps. I am fluent in Spanish. You can use "email this user" to send me email.

Porting sustainable development content

(Initial ideas - to be filled out further.)

Description

Identifying content of value to developing countries and development projects and porting it to MediaWiki format. We have permission to port a huge amount of content to Appropedia, and have tools to convert the formating, but it will take time and effort.

A description of the project you're proposing. What are the project's goals? Its motivations (why is this important?) What will be its end deliverables? What skills and/or equipment will be needed to do this project - what are the prerequisite skills and knowledge should the interns working on this project have, what kind of tools or access will they need, and how will these resources be provided?

Discussion

We have experience with interns doing this work already, e.g. the excellent work of Fatima in porting many valuable documents from Practical Action.

See also the SoC page on Appropedia.

Start some discussion about your proposal here - what questions remain to be worked out? What problems might it hit? What things about the project proposal could be improved? What resources might you pull for it? What people and organizations might it be good to get in touch with? Encourage others to contribute to this section (or contribute to this section, if you're not the original proposal author!)

Interested people

--Chriswaterguy - happy to act as mentor to 2 people (& I'm sure the Appropedia community can handle as many interns as are available). Chriswaterguy-at-appropedia-dot-org

Translating sustainable development content

(Initial ideas - to be filled out further.)

Description

Identifying key, high-value English language content on Appropedia (or elsewhere) that is in a fairly stable form, to translate into other languages.

Suggested focus languages: Any developing world languages. The developing world languages that Appropedia is best placed to support are Spanish and Indonesian.

An initial task will be to explore the best tools to do translation work in MediaWiki.

A description of the project you're proposing. What are the project's goals? Its motivations (why is this important?) What will be its end deliverables? What skills and/or equipment will be needed to do this project - what are the prerequisite skills and knowledge should the interns working on this project have, what kind of tools or access will they need, and how will these resources be provided?

Discussion

We have experience with interns doing this work already, e.g. the excellent work of Fatima in porting many valuable documents from Practical Action.

Start some discussion about your proposal here - what questions remain to be worked out? What problems might it hit? What things about the project proposal could be improved? What resources might you pull for it? What people and organizations might it be good to get in touch with? Encourage others to contribute to this section (or contribute to this section, if you're not the original proposal author!)

See also [SoC page on Appropedia].

Interested people

--Chriswaterguy - happy to act as mentor for Indonesian translation, and help in any other way I can. chriswaterguy-at-appropedia-dot-org