[Mailman-Developers] GSoC 2014 ideas list

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Máirín Duffy writes:

 > By UX design I don't mean simply surface aesthetics, but designing the 
 > interactions and workflows for new features and cleaning up what's 
 > there, scoping out new features (e.g., right now Karen and I are working 
 > out whether or not users should be able to follow categories in 
 > Hyperkitty like they can follow tags, walking through what a user might 
 > want to do based on how mailing lists may be set up, and the mechanisms 
 > we could add to allow the feature.)

The implementation of "workflows" such as "following categories like
tags" and "mechanisms" sounds good to me.  "New features" are
generally what Google is interested in sponsoring.

 > So she is doing some CSS yeah, but also javascript and she's modifying 
 > stuff in django too for the Bootstrap upgrade.

AIUI, the javascript and Django work sounds like it would be enough to
qualify for the "Code" in "Google Summer of Code".

 > Testing how well it works across various mobile formats.

Testing in the sense of running the program on different devices
doesn't qualify, and ISTR discussion on the Google lists to the effect
that even writing regression tests doesn't qualify by itself if they
basically amount to scripts to mimic a human thumbing on an iPhone. :-)
There's also a prejudice against declarative languages like HTML and
CSS.[1]

Google recognizes the value of CSS and regression tests, of course.
There has been discussion of extending GSoC (eg, Google Code-In for
high school students allows tasks defined by those activities, and
documentation as well), or having a separate intern program for them.
But GSoC is designed and funded for the purpose of supporting coding.

So from the point of view of GSoC proposals, the students should be
focusing on the Javascript and Python to be written to implement the
features in Django.

Overall it sounds to me like the project your student would propose is
very similar in content to what Shanu did, and the main thing is to
emphasize the Django/Python and Javascript coding, and make sure it
looks like a summer's worth of work in the proposal.

I would say at this point it's certainly worth writing up a
preliminary design proposal to see if it's worth putting in the work
to write up schedules and precise descriptions of deliverables.

Also, note that I can't speak *for* the Google administrators.

Footnotes: 
[1]  I mention that because I find these distinctions somewhat
specious, myself, but the language bias clearly exists among the
Google administrators.