Project Ideas for Outreach Program for Women

This page contains information participating in the Evergreen project through the Outreach Program for Women internship that will take place from December 2014 to March 2015. Please see the main Outreach Program for Women page for details on the program, including the timeline, information about the application process, and an application form.

If you've found this page, you might be interested in making a valuable contribution to the Evergreen project. The primary goal for our mentors is to enable interns to successfully contribute to our project and gain experience with the tools and social norms of open source development. We'll expect you to use the same communication channels, code repositories, and bug tracking systems as the rest of the community, while we help you in your efforts - and we, in turn, will learn from your insight as a newcomer to our community. We want the experience to be positive for each intern, each mentor, and for the project as a whole.

The Evergreen community has provided funding for one internship for the upcoming round.

The Evergreen Project develops an open source ILS (integrated library system) used by more than 1000 libraries around the world. The software, also called Evergreen, is used by libraries to provide their public catalog interface as well as to manage back-of-house operations such as circulation (checkouts and checkins), acquisition of library materials, and sharing resources among groups of libraries.

To become more familiar with the project:

• See how Evergreen works by trying it on one of our community demo servers.
• Read through our documentation
• If you are planning to submit an application for a coding project, download and install Evergreen.
  • Candidates installing on Debian Wheezy may want to try the Wheezy installer at http://git.evergreen-ils.org/?p=working/random.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/collab/phasefx/wheezy_installer for a script-based install for Evergreen.
  • Candidates using an Ubuntu VM host machine may want to try the VM Builder at http://git.evergreen-ils.org/?p=working/random.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/collab/tsbere/buildvms.The builder is not recommended for a standalone Ubuntu machine.
• Review our conventions for contributing to the project and/or our guidelines for contributing documentation to the repository.
• Subscribe to the mailing lists and drop into the Evergreen IRC channel. Note: The Evergreen IRC Channel is most active from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Eastern Mondays through Fridays. If you need to ask questions at other times, the mailing list may be a better choice.

We expect interns to communicate their progress publicly with the project, either via blog posts or posts to the mailing list, on a regular basis: weekly, at a minimum. Much more communication should also occur between the intern and the community on a daily basis through the normal modes of IRC, bug tracker, and mailing list.

As part of the application process, we expect applicants to make a contribution to the project prior to the application deadline.

• Applicants planning to work on a coding project are required to submit a patch or point to a branch that addresses some problem or adds some small enhancement. Bite-size bugs are good candidates to tackle. Applicants will need to submit an SSH key to the git administrators and gain working access to the Evergreen git repository. One can follow instructions on the dev:git page, which contains other useful information on use of git for the project.
• Applicants planning to work on a documentation project should submit an improvement to the Evergreen documentation. Bite-size documentation bugs are good candidates to tackle. Follow the intermediate-level instructions or the instructions for committing changes through the Evergreen working git repository.
• Applicants planning to work on a User Interface should make a list of three ways a current interface in the Evergreen client could be improved, why each suggestion is beneficial, and documentation to solidify your position. These recommendations can be posted to the Evergreen wiki.

Note: Potential applicants are welcome to discuss alternate project contributions with their mentors.

A good application will have the following properties:

• It will describe in some detail what features you hope to implement and how you will implement them.
• If it is based on one of the project ideas below, it will provide additional detail – it's not really enough just to quote the idea.
• It will include a timeline listing a few milestones for your project.

We strongly encourage all applicants to publicly discuss their proposals on the Evergreen mailing lists: open-ils-dev for coding projects, open-ils-documentation for documentation projects, and open-ils-general for UI projects.

• Description: The Evergreen staff client is currently in the midst of an overhaul, moving from its existing XUL-based client to a web-based AngularJS application. The current web-based self-service interface, called the self-check interface, is written in Dojo and is not currently part of the move to AngularJS. This project is to fix known bugs with the self-check interface and to rewrite it in AngularJS.
• Required Skills: Javascript
• Level of Difficulty: Medium
• Mentors: Galen Charlton and Ben Shum

• Description: In September 2013, a group of contributors created a more responsive catalog that would display better on small devices. This project would expand upon that original effort by improving responsiveness of catalog interfaces that still have display problems on mobile devices, making our current fonts and CSS better suited for customization, and possibly improving responsiveness and mobile functionality in the new web-based client.
• Required Skills: Template Toolkit, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Perl
• Level of Difficulty: Low
• Mentors: Dan Scott and Ben Shum

• Description: This project would provide integration between Evergreen and Awesome Box. The project would allow staff to enable an "awesome" check-in modifier when checking in awesome items, adding a title's "awesomeness" as a reportable field, and making this data available to the Awesome Box Service so that it can be used for a library's Awesome Page. See also https://bugs.launchpad.net/evergreen/+bug/1297976
• Required Skills: Perl, SQL
• Level of Difficulty: Low
• Mentors: Galen Charlton and Jason Stephenson

[No longer taking applicants]*

• Description: This project is to take a birds-eye view of the Evergreen documentation site and improve the organization and/or presentation of the information. This project might include the following, but not be limited to:
  • Evaluating analytics and getting user feedback;
  • Updating the doc site's stylesheets for improved presentation;
  • Finding opportunities to reorganize some content where it is needed;
  • Usability and navigation improvements within the docs site;
  • Considering ways to incorporate documentation into the Evergreen software.
• Skills: XSL, AsciiDoc, and basic UI design skills.
• Mentors: Kathy Lussier and Yamil Suarez

[No longer taking applicants]*

• Description: The existing Evergreen staff client shows some inconsistency in the design and layout of UI elements. The community is moving to a new web-based application, which also presents a good opportunity to provide some consistency among interfaces. This project is to create a UI style guide for Evergreen that can be used by developers as they design interfaces. The style guide should include guidelines for consistent layout of pages and design elements as well as consistent language.
• Skills: User Experience Design Basics
• Mentors: Grace Dunbar, Bill Erickson, and Dan Wells

*Due to the number of candidates who have already shown interest in the documentation and User Experience projects, we have closed off those projects to new prospective candidates. Anyone who began working with the documentation project mentors prior to October 14, 2014 or began working with the User Experience project mentors prior to October 16, 2014, is welcome to submit an application.

While documents have their place, there's generally no substitute for talking to existing community members - whether you're working through a tough piece of code, or putting together a patch, or just getting your development environment up and running - and you'll find that our community tries to support newcomers like you. If you have questions, the #evergreen IRC channel on Freenode is the best place to start. You can also use the Evergreen mailing lists if you prefer.

If you have questions about the above project ideas or want to kick around some new ideas that you have, you can contact the project mentors as follows:

Kathy Lussier - IRC nick: kmlussier, email:klussier@masslnc.org

• Galen Charlton - IRC nick: gmcharlt, email: gmc@esilibrary.com
• Grace Dunbar - IRC nick: graced, email: gdunbar@esilibrary.com
• Bill Erickson - IRC nick: berick, email: berickxx@gmail.com
• Kathy Lussier - IRC nick: kmlussier, email: klussier@masslnc.org
• Dan Scott - IRC nick: dbs, email: dan@coffeecode.net
• Ben Shum - IRC nick: bshum, email: bshum@biblio.org
• Jason Stephenson - IRC nick: Dyrcona, email: jstephenson@mvlc.org
• Yamil Suarez - IRC nick: yboston, email: ysuarez@berklee.edu
• Dan Wells - IRC nick: dbwells, email: dbw2@calvin.edu