1 Here are ideas you can try to get started on a SIPB project. Some of
2 these are mature projects with active new development a new
3 contributor can help out with, others are only grand plans that need
4 someone to take them on as their own.
6 Talk to the people identified for each project to see how you can
7 help, or ask the SIPB Chair (`price`) or Vice-Chair (`nelhage`). The
8 descriptions here are usually accurate but the projects are constantly
11 If you have a project and want people to help, go ahead and add it.
13 * SIPB website (sipb.mit.edu)
14 * (More information here)
16 * mailman.mit.edu hacking -- Talk to `kcr` or `nelhage`
17 * There are two ways to create mailing lists at MIT -- Moira, and
18 Mailman. Moira has much better integration with MIT
19 infrastructure, but doesn't support spam-filtering or interfaces
20 for non-MIT users. Mailman is the opposite. Jeff Schiller has
21 expressed some willingness to deploy patches to make Mailman
22 integrate better with MIT's infrastructure, if someone else were
24 * There are a number of ways this could be implemented, including
25 moira <-> Mailman sync, direct Moira integration in Mailman, or
26 something in between or different.
27 * MIT runs Mailman 2, but Mailman 3 has been released as alpha and
28 may be worth investigating. It's likely to be far easier to get
29 significant patches back upstream for mailman 3, if we go that
32 * Dodona -- Talk to `jhamrick`
33 * `jhamrick` is working on a Zephyr bot designed to answer technical
34 questions using a natural-language interface, and is looking for
35 people to help hack on it.
37 * `scripts.mit.edu` -- Talk to `geofft` or `quentin`
38 * Find some software we don't have an autoinstaller for, and write an
39 autoinstaller for it. Or update an autoinstaller to a newer version of the
40 software. This doesn't require a lot of code, since we have several
41 autoinstallers already written, but will require a bit of testing.
42 * Add a web interface for scripts users to edit their LDAP entries, which are
43 internal entries that affect several things about their site
44 * Read through already answered e-mails and update the FAQ on the website and
45 other parts of our documentation. This is a great way to learn how scripts
47 * Write a blog aggregator, something like planet.debian.org, so that scripts
48 blog users can publish their entries on certain topics to an MIT-wide blog
50 * XVM - talk to `price` or `broder`
51 * validate more operations at remote rather than web
52 * expose more operations over remctl in addition to web
53 * put our hosts in Moira
54 * ajaxify / javascriptify the website
55 * Give the website a stylistic facelift.
57 * voip-scripts - talk to `geofft`
58 * read about Asterisk, AGI, study `captain-crunch:/etc/asterisk` and `/var/lib/asterisk`
59 * figure out draft suexec code at `/var/lib/asterisk/agi-bin/suexec.c`
60 * figure out or ask what's not working, figure out how to do it
62 * Documentation project
63 * Assemble good documentation of AFS from a user's perspective. There's lots of
64 documentation, but only small parts are good and useful.
65 * Cull old Ask SIPB columns into documentation.
66 * Cull documentation into new Ask SIPB columns.
68 * Archiver - talk to `nelhage`
69 We want to build a mail archiving system for Moira lists. We're
70 planning to store mail into AFS, and expose archives via AFS, IMAP,