A calendar database of social events and conferences
Description of the project: There are a wide range of social events and conferences for free software developers, including large conferences like DebConf or FOSDEM and smaller events like MiniDebConf and hackathons. As well as the dates of the events, there are also dates for various deadlines, such as submitting a talk proposal or applying for a travel subsidy. Some projects have started trying to gather data about these events, such as LWN Calendar, Agenda du Libre, Grical and Freie Termine. This project will involve improving one of those existing systems or developing additional systems to help communities advertise their events and to help people discover events.
The page SocialEventAndConferenceCalendars provides more details about the requirements and architecture for this project.
It would be desirable if the work you do is generic enough that it can be used in the free software community but also for other communities, for example, tracking the events published by student clubs at a university or local community events in the city where you live.
If you like visiting events yourself then this is an exciting project to work on.
Confirmed Mentor: Balram Pariyarath
How to contact the mentor: balbbrl@gmail.com
Confirmed co-mentors:
Deliverables of the project: one or more of the following (some tasks are Python, some are Ruby, some are PHP, you can choose):
enhancing the code behind Agenda du Libre
enhancing the code behind ?Grical
enhancing the code behind Freie Termine
making a plugin for other community web sites to maintain calendars within their existing web site (plugin for Discourse forums, MoinMoin, Drupal, MediaWiki, WordPress, etc) and export it as iCalendar data
- developing web-crawlers to find iCalendar data on sites
- developing tools for parsing iCalendar feeds and storing the data into a large central database
- developing tools for searching the database to help somebody find relevant events or see a list of deadlines for bursary applications
Desirable skills: Python, Ruby, PHP. Front-end web development skills may also be relevant (HTML, ?JavaScript, CSS)
What the intern will learn: how communities announce and share data about their social events.
Application tasks: learning about the iCalendar file format:
if you are a Ruby developer, send me (privately) your analysis and proposed solution for this bug
if you are a Python developer, send me (privately) your analysis and proposed solution for this bug
if you are a PHP developer, try to run the WPCall plugin for WordPress. Email me privately with your observations and a proposed enhancement to the code.
Related projects: UltimateDebianDatabase, LWN Calendar, Agenda du Libre, Grical, Freie Termine, Github-iCalendar issue feed, Nagios-iCalendar, Debian UDD/BTS iCalendar, Agenda Livre (pt-br)