This is the ideas page for Public Lab's Rails Girls Summer of Code and Google Summer of Code program, programs for student fellows to work on free and open source projects.

Important -- if you're new to Public Lab software contributing, see our Welcome page and our Contributing page

Get in touch

We love to hear from new contributors! Reach out on the developer mailing list - or in our chat room. We've embedded a small chatroom right here:

Contribution guidelines

Our Contributing to Public Lab Software page has our preferred guidelines for submitting changes. Please read it over!

We also love it when students show that they can work well with us by trying a first-timers-only issue, and even submitting a pull request. This gives us confidence that you've read our contribution guidelines and would be ready to jump into a project. To get started, see our welcome page:

Welcome page: https://publiclab.github.io/community-toolbox/#r=all

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How to post a proposal

(for students)

Please first leave a comment on the post below, and tell us what you're interested in and a bit about your experience. It's also great to hear if you've forked one of our codebases) and installed it on your computer or a test environment. Done with that? How about running tests? Tell us how far you've gotten, and ask us for help -- we're happy to help you get started!

Read the call for proposals, ask questions, and post your ideas:

(2017 program link -- 2018 coming soon!) Post a proposal here -- and view proposals posted so far

Questions

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Ideas

Want to propose an idea? Click here

We're currently collecting ideas on this page:

https://publiclab.org/talk/gsoc-ideas

Those that are ready for students to look over are here:

Interactive Project Maps

Part of: https://github.com/publiclab/plots2

Description: A browseable map of projects (wiki pages tagged with "project" tag) based on this initial implementation (https://publiclab.org/wiki/inline-maps) for people to find and learn about projects near them. This uses the Leaflet map library, and we'd like clicking on the map marker to show things like the title, lead image, # of contributors, and related topics names (tags). This would require both JavaScript work with Leaflet and Ruby on Rails work to generate the listings, as well as interface design work to develop the browse-able map interface. An alternate view would display current map marker records as a list.

• https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/issues/1416 v0.2b & v0.2c for back-end and API integration
• https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/milestone/7 covers a range of related sub-issues in detail

List: plots-dev@googlegroups.com

Prerequisites: JavaScript, Ruby on Rails

Difficulty Level: medium

Potential mentors: Jeff Warren (@warren), Stevie Lewis (@stevie)

Rich Editor Extras

Part of: https://publiclab.org / https://github.com/publiclab/plots2, https://github.com/publiclab/PublicLab.Editor/

Description: Better user interfaces for inserting inline power tags like Activity grids, Questions grids, maps, and other features (many listed here and here) from inside the Rich Editor and/or the Inline Editor interfaces. This will require Bootstrap HTML UI work on the PublicLab.Editor project, as well as integration with the PublicLab.org website back-end, ideally through our growing standard API: https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/blob/master/doc/API.md

For a starting piont, see an example interface in the Editor project demo, here: https://publiclab.github.io/PublicLab.Editor/examples/

List: plots-dev@googlegroups.com

Prerequisites: Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, Bootstrap

Difficulty Level: medium

Potential mentors: Jeff Warren (@warren), Liz Barry (@liz)