Google Summer of Code 2010 Reflection

Posted by auzigog on Aug 31, 2010 in GSoC 2010 | 5 comments

Google Summer of Code came to and end last week and I wanted to post a bit about my experiences, accomplishments and plans for the future.

I went into the program looking for a way to fund my work on a program that I had been dreaming about after 2 years in the activism world. I was delighted to be selected by the Drupal community to contribute modules as part of Google Summer of Code 2010.

All-in-all, I had a fantastic experience with the program. GSoC is an amazing program to bring open source organizations and college students together and I’m happy that Google offers it. They contribute add a key element to the equation and ask very little in return. Working with the Drupal community was a pleasure.

In my proposal for this project, I set out to begin work on a project management tool for teams of activists to manage their events, tasks, meetings, groups, listservs, docs and other data related to their project. The four areas I set out to contribute to were: subgroups, more flexible task tracking, discussion listservs, and meetings. I was successful in 3 of these. All of these features were envision to be applied on top of the project management tools offered in Open Atrium, but also function well when applied stand-alone to a standard Drupal installation. These tools are meant to replace certain aspects of the Google Docs/Google Groups/Google Sites combo that are scattered and hard to manage.

I learned an amazing amount about open source programming, Drupal, and projects in general.

Meetings Module

Posted by auzigog on Jul 27, 2010 in Features, GSoC 2010 | 0 comments

My work over the past two weeks has been focused on creating the Meetings module.

The motivation for this module came from the fact that most organizations I work with have a fair number of meetings to coordinate projects, but have no sane way of tracking them. Notes are always taken at the top of a google doc, agenda items are hard to gather in advance, and it is nearly impossible to find notes from the past.

Here is a screencast demonstrating most of these features.

The current release (alpha 2) is almost ready to be moved to a stable release. Current features include:

• Track date, time, location, agenda of individual meetings
• Take notes at a meeting
• Create repeating meetings
• Invite users to meetings
• Take attendance at meetings
• Organic Groups integration for invitations/attendance
• Views to show recent/upcoming meetings

If you have a few minutes to test out the current release of Meetings, I would really appreciate any feedback you have. You can post issues to the issue queue.

Open Atrium & Case Tracker for Drupal 7

Posted by auzigog on May 25, 2010 in Features, GSoC 2010 | 8 comments

As part of my continuing effort to narrow the scope of my project plan for the summer, I have been in contact with Jeff Miccolis from Development Seed, the maintainer of the Case Tracker module and one of the lead developers of Open Atrium.

He was able to fill me in on the early plans for Drupal 7 ports of Open Atrium (OA) and Case Tracker.

Open Atrium for Drupal 7

According to Jeff, the current plan is to get a stable 1.0 release of OA out the door before any big ports or feature additions.  He said that it was “close to impossible” that there will be a stable D7 release of OA before the end of the summer.

As much as I’d personally like to see a D7 release, it is understandably hard for the OA team to base their plans around an unpredictable roadmap for Drupal core. While it may make sense for some contrib modules to pledge to have a D7 version ready the day that D7 is released, OA is a complex piece of art and it will take more time for the D7 core and contrib code to be solid enough for a port to be feasible.

This opens some interesting question for Activism Labs, which are discussed below.

Project Tracking Tools

Posted by auzigog on May 23, 2010 in GSoC 2010 | 0 comments

Coding begins tomorrow for Google Summer of Code, so I’m working with my mentors to finalize the project plan.  This includes cutting back my very ambitious initial project proposal and choosing a tool track my tasks, features, and bugs for the project.

Tracking Tool: Pivotal Tracker

I evaluated a lot of project management tools on a variety of factors. The main thing I was looking for was something that was popular enough to have integration with other software development tools. I ended up selecting Pivotal Tracker, for the following reasons:

• It’s free for project of any size
• It uses a story-based system
• It works well for an agile development workflow
• I can drag and drop things :)
• Integration with many popular tools including GitHub
• There is an iPhone app (multiple apps, actually)
• Good introduction video

I spent most of today moving all my specifications for the project over to user stories.

View the user stories for Activism Labs (click on Icebox to see all of the planned features)

Question: What is your preferred project management tool for Drupal modules?

Proposal Accepted to GSoC 2010

Posted by auzigog on Apr 27, 2010 in GSoC 2010 | 0 comments

Hooray!

This morning the list of accepted Google Summer of Code projects was announced! The proposal for Activism Labs was accepted!

I’m really excited to work with the Drupal community and build some tools that will facilitate better project management.

My primary mentor is houndbee and I will be getting help from benjamin-agaric and sdboyer.

Also, I created a twitter account to track the progress of the project: @activismlabs

If you’re interested in keeping up to date with the project, subscribe to the RSS feed.

Special thanks to heyrocker, dmitrig01 and others in the Drupal community who are helping make GSoC happen.