Cool OSS Projects Need Cool Developers
I attended a PyGTA meeting yesterday. They showcased OLPC (and brought the hardware! yey). It was extremely infomative and really interesting, since I knew next to nothing about Sugar and the OLPC program. Now I join the population who would kill to have one… well, not kill… but cry.
The prospects for the laptop are incredible- the bar has been set quite high. This is quite scary for the developers on the team, because a hard deadline has been set for August this year to ship. The project isn’t nearly in a shippable state right now, since there are many desired features unimplemented and several bugs. But, there is an attack plan (some updating system) for the future.
A big part of the presentation was to recruit developers to contribute to this open source project. It was stressed how important it is, and if I had the time this would be my focus. Its a great way to give back- so if anyone is interested in contributing, they would appreciate it greatly. What about incorporating this with Google’s Summer of Code?
Another project I have been involved in this year is OLM. This is an online marking tool to help Computer Science instructors better mark coding assignments by being able to mark up the code directly on the screen. A screencast can be found on the website, but it is slightly out of date. There is a Google Summer of Code proposal for this project. It is in excellent shape, but still requires a lot of work (and refactoring). Again, if anyone is interested or has any questions- please ask.
