SIPB: MIT Student Information Processing Board
project-ideas
Here are ideas you can try to get started on a SIPB project. Some of
these are mature projects with active new development a new
contributor can help out with, others are only grand plans that need
someone to take them on as their own.
Talk to the people identified for each project to see how you can
help, or ask the SIPB Chair (price
) or Vice-Chair (nelhage
). The
descriptions here are usually accurate but the projects are constantly
changing.
If you have a project and want people to help, go ahead and add it.
SIPB website (sipb.mit.edu) -- talk to price
- We're working on making the website a wiki, which will hopefully
help it get and stay up to date in the long term. The core software
should be up before the hackathon.
- write stuff about SIPB
- convert material from the old sites and this doc wiki
- help style it to look good
mailman.mit.edu hacking -- Talk to kcr
or nelhage
- There are two ways to create mailing lists at MIT -- Moira, and
Mailman. Moira has much better integration with MIT
infrastructure, but doesn't support spam-filtering or interfaces
for non-MIT users. Mailman is the opposite. Jeff Schiller has
expressed some willingness to deploy patches to make Mailman
integrate better with MIT's infrastructure, if someone else were
to write them.
- There are a number of ways this could be implemented, including
moira <-> Mailman sync, direct Moira integration in Mailman, or
something in between or different.
- MIT runs Mailman 2, but Mailman 3
has been released
as alpha and may be worth investigating. The author is explicitly
open to major changes for mailman 3, so we could push some of our work upstream.
Dodona -- Talk to jhamrick
jhamrick
is working on a Zephyr bot designed to answer technical
questions using a natural-language interface, and is looking for
people to help hack on it.
- create a web interface using pyjamas (or something else?) for people who don't use zephyr
- figure out the best way to store and retrieve technical data. Currently
Dodona pulls from a text file and parses that information into a dictionary.
- improve Dodona's UI
- IF (and only if) we finish all of the above, start the NLP! (the fun part!)bbb
scripts.mit.edu
-- Talk to geofft
or quentin
- Find some software we don't have an autoinstaller for, and write an
autoinstaller for it. Or update an autoinstaller to a newer version of the
software. This doesn't require a lot of code, since we have several
autoinstallers already written, but will require a bit of testing.
- Add a web interface for scripts users to edit their LDAP entries, which are
internal entries that affect several things about their site
- Read through already answered e-mails and update the FAQ on the website and
other parts of our documentation. This is a great way to learn how scripts
works
- Write a blog aggregator, something like planet.debian.org, so that scripts
blog users can publish their entries on certain topics to an MIT-wide blog
XVM - talk to price
or broder
- validate more operations at remote rather than web
- expose more operations over remctl in addition to web
- put our hosts in Moira
- ajaxify / javascriptify the website
- Give the website a stylistic facelift.
voip-scripts - talk to geofft
- read about Asterisk, AGI, study
captain-crunch:/etc/asterisk
and /var/lib/asterisk
- figure out draft suexec code at
/var/lib/asterisk/agi-bin/suexec.c
- figure out or ask what's not working, figure out how to do it
Documentation project
- Assemble good documentation of AFS from a user's perspective. There's lots of
documentation, but only small parts are good and useful.
- Cull old Ask SIPB columns into documentation.
- Cull documentation into new Ask SIPB columns.
Archiver - talk to nelhage
We want to build a mail archiving system for Moira lists. We're
planning to store mail into AFS, and expose archives via AFS, IMAP,
and the web.