GSOC 2013/Student Application Sarupbanskota/Design Hub(461)

Contact Information

Name: Sarup Banskota FAS Account: sarupbanskota Fedora userpage: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Sarupbanskota Email Address: sbanskota08 AT gmail DOT com Blog URL: http://thirstyforcola.wordpress.com/category/technology/foss/ Freenode IRC Nick: banas

Why Fedora?

My prime motivation to choose Fedora is the Design team project I've decided to contribute to. It is in line with my summer goals, and being a hobby designer myself, I look forward to connecting with other designers to discover new ideas, and observe how they work. Furthermore, I'm a FOSS fan, and have known Fedora to be a large and diverse organization, doing extensive projects ranging from artwork to robotics.

Being a student new to Open Source, I look forward to being involved with an organization which has an exciting culture and community. I aim to stick around and become a long term contributor across diverse areas, and Fedora gives me exactly the opportunity.

Past contributions to Open Source Projects:

Since I am new, I don't have any major contributions yet. In the last month or so, I did a couple of small contributions to Mozilla:

 #  Built a simple UI for the Mozilla webRTC landing page[1]. The page is responsive, and uses Twitter Bootstrap.
 #  I'm currently working on improving a patch[2] I wrote for their automation team. It involved improving a testing library written in JavaScript and updating tests that use it.
 

I'm really excited about starting my Open Source adventures with Fedora. As a starting point, I have made around 5 patches and sent a pull request[3] to the summer project I want to work on.

Past GSoC Participation:

No. This is my first attempt at GSoC.

Contribution and Support to The Fedora Project after GSoC:

There are quite a few improvements on this summer project that would be really nice to have, but might not be within the scope of the coding period. I've also discussed the project with Emily(User:Emichan)[4] and Máirín(User:Duffy)[5], from the Fedora design team, professors from University, and a few other independent designers and developers I know personally. All of them had valuable suggestions that could make the project more powerful. My first goal after this program would be to implement such improvements.

I use Fedora and I love it. Once I do some more reading on Operating Systems, I would want to explore further. Hopefully, through this summer project, I will interact with people working in varied areas, and make useful contacts who'll help me and introduce me to interesting projects by Fedora. As an attempt to stay updated, I follow Fedora's various mailing lists regularly. I am open to being assigned any project that matches my skills.

Of course, I will maintain anything I develop, and contribute more wherever I can.

Why choose me?

I spent my first year in University volunteering at FOSS events organized by my seniors. I have been a fan, and now a dedicated user of FOSS products for all purposes. This summer, I want to give back. While building on skills I already have, I want to learn more from people from the vibrant Fedora community. I consider GSoC to be a prestigious learning opportunity, where I can make lifetime connections, and after which I can identify myself as part of a team whose products I constantly use. I can give 50 hours a week to the project until mid-July, and 40 hours thereafter. I might have to take a few very short breaks in between, but I have tried my best to reflect them in the timeline.

Some other relevant points:

• I am familiar with primary Open Source techniques – issue tracking, mailing lists, basic revision control.
• I have experience in Object Oriented Programming and Web Technologies. I have worked with C++ and Python, and am currently learning Ruby on Rails. I have built decent websites, and possess good design skills.
• I love to write, and I blog quite often. I believe this will also help me develop an interesting and well laid-out documentation for the project.
• I started communication about the project quite early, thanks to which my prospective mentor provided me with a good number of resources and services for inspiration. I try to be as self-sufficient as possible and use search engines and mailing lists effectively.
• I take this program to be just a nice starting point for a long-term connection with the Fedora community.

Project Proposal:

An overview: As quoted from the ideas page, "Free software designers don't have a great set of tools to work with to collaborate with each other and with the community on their design work. With this project, we'd like to make progress towards fixing that". This project aims to build a web based tool, Glitter Gallery, that will allow designers to collaborate and maintain revisions with other designers and developers.

Glitter Gallery is a web application hosted on OpenShift, which aims to improve designer-designer and designer-developer collaboration experience. Currently, the only collaboration tools designers are forced to use is email and services such as DropBox/SparkleShare. Developers have tools such as GitHub. This application aims to relieve the FLOSS designer of these hassles, while offering them additional features such as a front end for Revision Control, while being able to edit SVG format files on the fly. Users follow the GitHub model of creating/forking/pulling repositories. Teams can work on projects, give and take feedback, and keep track of issues.

Such a project would not just benefit Fedora designers, but all FLOSS designers. This tool is highly desired, because developer-centric tools don't entirely apply to designers, and without proper collaboration, designers find it difficult to produce quality work. Especially when the team is spread out in Open Source projects such as Fedora, it is crucial that designers collaborate somewhere, parse feedback, and improve.

The need I believe the project fulfills: "We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us."

• Designers are forced to use traditional tools such as email for feedback combined with synchronization tools such as DropBox/SparkleShare. It’s surprising there are no efficient tools available to collaborate better. The only few options available are paid ones, and fail at being feature-complete.
• Services such as GitHub exist, but they are more inclined towards developers, and don’t really apply to the designer, who is looking for a tool that allows visual editing of work on the fly, along with its maintenance.
• This project should appeal to any designer who wants to create and edit design projects, share work with other designers or developers, maintain revision logs, parse feedback, and do discussions - all at the same place. It relieves the Open Source designer of the time lost on trying to put feedback from different sources into one place.

Relevant experience:

• I am a CS student in University and have worked on Object Oriented projects (in C++/Python).
• On the web, have built websites[6] using HTML/CSS and basic jQuery.
• Have worked with responsive frameworks. That should help me with the UI.
• Have used Git for many of my personal projects, and I still continue to learn it. Considering a major part of the project revolves around building a front end for git, I think that should be helpful.
• I'm a CodeSchool[7] subscriber and have successfully completed their intermediate courses on Ruby and the Rails framework. I am sure to complete the rest by the end of May.
• Most of the project is hosted on GitHub. I use[8] and understand it.

Final Deliverables:

• Largely, the summer goals would be to improve on Glitter Gallery, such that it includes:
  • Core features (Higher priority):
    • The GitHub forking/pulling model with facility for multiple admins.
    • On the fly SVG editing.
    • Create a front-end for revision control, using the git-backend SparkleShare provides.
    • Work on the comment mechanism, to build a mini-issue tracker using comments marked as issues.
    • There is no documentation yet - a complete documentation of whatever is built.
  • Add ons (Medium Priority):
    • OpenID integration for the user accounts.
    • Add some social features to users and projects, such as letting popular ones trend on a homepage.
    • Provide users with an openblog of their own.
• Future developments (might be added if time permits):
  • • Provision for real time meetings, and team assignments.
    • Displaying info on IRC on the mention of a project code/issue.