[Edu-sig] generic open source projects...

[Laura Creighton]

>What I need to find out before going too far with this is:
>
>(a) do we already have exactly what I'm seeking as a public project?

Not that I know of.  And given that after 'I want to make a game' this
is the number 1 thing that children I meet want to learn programming
to do -- find out when their favourite websites change so they won't
miss anything but don't have to go there every day, I would predict 
that this project would have a lot of mass appeal.  But I think 
that Ian Bicking has written and released code that would be
useful.

>(b) will I be able to find schools that want to turn students loose on
>this scaffolding?

No clue.  But I would have a hard time finding non-university schools
interested around here.

>(c) are we looking at a real project like on Sourceforge, or just a
>set of interconnected examples that feature aspects of Python?

Well, I would like to make the buzz bot understand something like
'other language plugins' from the start.  Maybe we need some 
linguistic-trained people? or would just a good sampling of people
who speak other languages from the onset work?

>This proposal is in part a response to Laura's CP4E work on the
>Diversity list.  She's been suggesting that a primary barrier to
>increasing diversity is simply the daunting time demands, the somewhat
>austere culture of half-moribund bug trackers and dev lists (some of
>these are more like sunken shipwrecks) -- scares people away,
>especially people who "have a life" outside of being uber-nerds.

Ah, in context, I think this scares them away from Python Core Development;
I am sure that there are other projects which have other reasons
that are the primary reason for lack of diversity.

>The fancier buzzbots fork into multiple Python worker bee processes
>that each harvest and file to SQL independently, with a Dispatcher
>(queen bee) keeping track of open searches, handing them off to
>available processes.  I published some manga code to the Chicago user
>list awhile back, haven't tried to dig for it yet...

Speaking of manga - an image-scraper-and-recogniser would be awesome.
But I don't know how to write one of those, at all.  Wonder who does?

Laura

>
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