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Here is an example of a successful proposal from Evergreen's participation in the 2011 Google Summer of Code.
Name: Joseph Lewis
Email: [joehms22 gmail com]
IRC nick on Freenode: joseph_
Current course of study/major: Computer Science (Information Security specifically)
The problem I am proposing to solve comes from the wiki:
Bring sanity to the Evergreen configuration interface Problem: There are currently 139 individual settings that a library can change within one interface in the Evergreen staff client. The presentation is a simple alphabetical list, with no further means of filtering these settings. Help for these rather complex settings is limited to a single string. There is no provision for tracking changes to the system configuration over time to correlate configuration changes to problems that may be observed. This interface is daunting for system administrators and would greatly benefit from a skilled user interface designer/implementer. Required skills: JavaScript, CSS Level of difficulty: Easy to medium Mentors: Galen Charlton
Here is what I proposed implementing:
This will not take up the entire time you get me however, there are some more configuration interface irregularities that should be cleaned up though, which I have added in to the timeline below:
I have built some web technologies before; as a student I aided others getting around the school firewall by creating my own PHP/JavaScript flash games site. I have been paid to develop a secure web-application for a Real Estate firm in Denver (PHP/JS); therefore I’m not entirely unfamiliar with these sorts of web technologies.
I have also read some of Jakob Nielsen’s books on User Interface design/usability, and so have a somewhat better than average knowledge of what makes things easy for people to use.
I recently submitted a rather minor bugfix that makes osrf_ctl.sh smarter: https://bugs.launchpad.net/evergreen/+bug/741088
I have oftentimes come back from the library (several kinds city/school) disappointed because their systems are so archaic. The interfaces are difficult to navigate, doing common tasks seems difficult, and search results are oftentimes less useful than those brought up by Google. I have also sat next to librarians for days on end listening to the groans they have when their software doesn’t work. That is what makes me so excited about this project, (and I’ll still probably get involved if I don’t get accepted, although not to the same extent), open source software has the ability to be incredibly agile and bring modernity to institutions that are still central hubs of information in the world.