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) -- talk to `price`
14 * We're working on making the website a wiki, which will hopefully
15 help it get and stay up to date in the long term. The core software
16 should be up before the hackathon.
17 * write stuff about SIPB
18 * convert material from the old sites and this doc wiki
19 * help style it to look good
21 * mailman.mit.edu hacking -- Talk to `kcr` or `nelhage`
22 * There are two ways to create mailing lists at MIT -- Moira, and
23 Mailman. Moira has much better integration with MIT
24 infrastructure, but doesn't support spam-filtering or interfaces
25 for non-MIT users. Mailman is the opposite. Jeff Schiller has
26 expressed some willingness to deploy patches to make Mailman
27 integrate better with MIT's infrastructure, if someone else were
29 * There are a number of ways this could be implemented, including
30 moira <-> Mailman sync, direct Moira integration in Mailman, or
31 something in between or different.
32 * MIT runs Mailman 2, but Mailman 3
33 [has been released](http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-announce/2009-January/000126.html)
34 as alpha and may be worth investigating. The author is explicitly
35 open to major changes for mailman 3, so we could push some of our work upstream.
37 * Dodona -- Talk to `jhamrick`
38 * `jhamrick` is working on a Zephyr bot designed to answer technical
39 questions using a natural-language interface, and is looking for
40 people to help hack on it.
41 * create a web interface using pyjamas (or something else?) for people who don't use zephyr
42 * figure out the best way to store and retrieve technical data. Currently
43 Dodona pulls from a text file and parses that information into a dictionary.
45 * IF (and only if) we finish all of the above, start the NLP! (the fun part!)bbb
48 * `scripts.mit.edu` -- Talk to `geofft` or `quentin`
49 * Find some software we don't have an autoinstaller for, and write an
50 autoinstaller for it. Or update an autoinstaller to a newer version of the
51 software. This doesn't require a lot of code, since we have several
52 autoinstallers already written, but will require a bit of testing.
53 * Add a web interface for scripts users to edit their LDAP entries, which are
54 internal entries that affect several things about their site
55 * Read through already answered e-mails and update the FAQ on the website and
56 other parts of our documentation. This is a great way to learn how scripts
58 * Write a blog aggregator, something like planet.debian.org, so that scripts
59 blog users can publish their entries on certain topics to an MIT-wide blog
61 * XVM - talk to `price` or `broder`
62 * validate more operations at remote rather than web
63 * expose more operations over remctl in addition to web
64 * put our hosts in Moira
65 * ajaxify / javascriptify the website
66 * Give the website a stylistic facelift.
68 * voip-scripts - talk to `geofft`
69 * read about Asterisk, AGI, study `captain-crunch:/etc/asterisk` and `/var/lib/asterisk`
70 * figure out draft suexec code at `/var/lib/asterisk/agi-bin/suexec.c`
71 * figure out or ask what's not working, figure out how to do it
73 * Documentation project
74 * Assemble good documentation of AFS from a user's perspective. There's lots of
75 documentation, but only small parts are good and useful.
76 * Cull old Ask SIPB columns into documentation.
77 * Cull documentation into new Ask SIPB columns.
79 * Archiver - talk to `nelhage`
80 We want to build a mail archiving system for Moira lists. We're
81 planning to store mail into AFS, and expose archives via AFS, IMAP,