Difference between revisions of "Summer of Code 2006"

Creative Commons is participates in Google's Summer of Code as a mentoring organization. Submissions for SoC 2007 will open in March; see the timeline for more details. A list of projects accepted for SoC 2006 is available here.

This page highlights ideas and suggestions for student proposals.

Students

If you find an idea listed below that you like or have your own idea for a Creative Commons-related open source project, we encourage you to read up about the Creative Commons Developer Community, ask questions, and then include the following in your proposal:

1. Detailed description / design document
2. an approximate schedule (timeline)
3. brief description of past projects (including open source) that you've participated in
4. brief resume/bio/contact information

Writing Proposals

The following links detail successfull general ways to write a Summer of Code Proposal:

• HOWTO Write Project Proposals
• Inkscape's Accepted Proposals
• Internet2 Experience
• Portland State University Experience
• http://venge.net/monotone/summerofcode.html
• http://www.internet2.edu/~shalunov/tmp/rwatson-soc.txt

Selection Criteria

Please read the Selection Criteria. Participants who read this will be much further along than others.

Questions

1. Read up about the Creative Commons Developer Community
2. Join the cc-devel mailing list and ask questions
3. Join the Creative Commons chat channel, #cc, on irc.freenode.net.

Deadlines

Student applications open on March 14, 2006 and close March 24, 2006. Final decisions by Creative Commons will be made by April 9, 2006 for submission to Google.

General Ideas

More ideas are avaible in the Developer Challenges section of the website. What follows is a generalized listing of quick ideas which any student may use to identify interests. Please do not be constrained by the ideas below, but please use them to jumpstart and understand the general areas we are interested in supporting.

Publish

• Any new tools which support publishing of content licensed with a Creative Commons license
• Develop plugins that utilize Creative Commons licenses and metadata in your favorite applications. If these are web-based ideally licensing both at site-level and "object" (e.g., page, image) level should be supported, and RDFa metadata.

Find (Search)

• Any new tools which support finding of content licensed with a Creative Commons license
• Extend the CcNutch codebase to support RDFa and image, audio, or video search (using scoped metadata, not image/audio/video analysis!)

ccHost

• Extend ccHost to work with new media filetypes and push changes up-stream to getid3().
• Implement the Sample Pool API in other web backends or software applications

ccPublisher

• Implement support for embedding license metadata in additional file types; this support would be in the form of additions to the cctagutils library. Contact Nathan Yergler for details or specifics.
• Implement back end support for other publishing platforms, such as Flickr, My Space, etc. Basic documentation on storage providers has been started.

LiveCD (and other CD/Disc Distributions)

• LiveCD: Create an Open Source LiveCD which adds CC-licensed content and features the Creative Commons Tools. Also, one should make a way to keep in sync with mainline LiveCDs so that this project does not have to maintain its own LiveCD.
• Another type of CD project would be a script which collects different high-quality CC-licensed content onto a standard disc sizes (CD, DVD) along with the different CC software projects (and the OS' they support). Important for this is to develop a strong way to automate the creation of these discs which could be used by [Freedom Toaster Kiosks http://www.freedomtoaster.org/], the $100 Laptop Project, and other projects. The ideas is that anyone could take an on-line ISO and burn it for use off-line.

Desktop Applications

• Add support for selecting a license within open source applications such as the above. A successful implementation will use the web services to provide up to date license information.
• Integrate finding and reusing of CC licensed content directly within applications like OpenOffice.org, The Gimp, Inkscape, Audacity, etc.

Desktop Integration

• Integrate finding and publishing of CC licensed content directly within the Open Source Desktop (think Gnome or KDE integration). A starting point for Gnome may be the prototype Nautilus extension for displaying license information embedded in MP3 files.
• Extend the CC licensing extractor for Spotlight to support multiple file formats and polish it to release quality. Issues which must be addressed include extractor chaining and packaging.

Media Mixing

• Build basic media mixing tools either for the Open Source Desktop or for the web (think AJAX) that allows for mixing of legal media files (photos, videos, music, etc) in order to create interesting remixes and art.
• Build an application (probably DHTML would be most useful) that allows one to drag licenses and see how they may be combined.
• Build an audio or video editing/mixing application with CC support or add support for importing and using CC licensed material and licensing remixes to an existing project such as http://www.diva-project.org

Web Mashups

• Its all the craze! Develop some web mashups by combining multiple different web-based APIs (creative commons, amazon, google, flickr, archive.org) to create a project that uses these APIs to help spread CC-licensing

Attributors

• Create scripts, a website, or cross-platform software project which add attribution and basic license information into and/or onto media. The "into" part deals with embedding metadata inside of the media files. The "onto" part deals with some type of media overlay onto the content to identify who a work is attributing to, the license being used, and a URL to the license. Have fun with this one to create interesting creative content that conveys the license. See this link on how to properly add a CC license to a work
  • Photos: this would create some basic graphical overlay on the image, or basic html wrappers around the content that says author name, license (url). (Think simple banner)
  • Audio: Add a small snippet of audio stating the license, url to license, and the author name somewhere in the file (beginning or end) (Think quick PSA)
  • Video: Create a video bumper that is at the beginning (preferably) or end of a video that states the type of license being used, url to the license, and the author name/url. (Think opening credits)
  • Other Media: Please propose other ways one could attribute authorship on the media itself

Open access publishing and Science

• Create or add CC licensing and RDFa support to an open access publishing tool.
  • Example
    • It would appear a practical RDFa proposal would be around tagging a scientific HTML doc with the triples extracted and built with an NLP tool. The elements of the text, genes, diseases, pathways, therapeutics, etc, would be directly embedded in the text around such words (perhaps rendered as typed links) , while the triples of how they interplay would be represented as well. This would bring together the human readable world with the concept-codified space.
• An application that does something interesting with Uniprot or other CC-licensed dataset enabled by CC licensing.

Bonus Points

An ideal proposal would include support for RDFa, remixing, open formats and affordances for educational and worldwide (not just wealthy regions) use. Ability to release under an open source license and incorporation of some Creative Commons affordance are necessary. However, a solid proposal is far more important than buzzword compliance. Please read Google's Summer of Code Student FAQ and advice from past participants as you create your proposal. Good luck!

Mentors

• Mike Linksvayer (mlinksva)
• Jon Phillips (rejon)
• Nathan Yergler (nyergler)
• Alex Roberts

External Links

• Google Summer of Code (SoC)
• Google SoC FAQ