Group: GNU Generation/Project brainstorming

If you do not like any of the existing projects, why not create your own? You can find some inspiration for possible projects below if you don't already have an idea. If you have a project idea for someone else, feel free to post it below. If you have your own idea or felt inspired by something on this page, create a project and enter the Free Software community!

General

Programming

• Contribute code to one of the official GNU packages
• Create a Free Software plugin for your favorite Free Software application
• Design a distributed social networking platform and release it under the AGPL
• Create a new GPL or AGPL application from scratch!
• Look for Free Software projects that have already developed projects for Google Summer of Code

Local Community

• Organize a GNU/Linux install-fest and/or educational event in your hometown
• Create a Free Software club at your school to help your peers understand Free Software and switch to GNU/Linux, and provide technical and moral support to these new users
• Start a computer recycling project to bring GNU/Linux based computers to impoverished students in your community

Writing

• Create or update documentation for your favorite small-medium sized Free Software project

Project Specific

Libre.fm

• Libre.fm is a music community website that aims to provide a replacement for last.fm
• See http://libre.fm, or contact Matt Lee (mattl@libre.fm) for more information.

Software Directory

• Creating a software directory that features good free software. (With a different approach than directory.fsf.org)
• I posted a brainstorm on my (User:Nikita) user page.
• Any ideas if this is a worthwhile project? (There are some possible cons).

Free Software for Bay Area Schools

• Moving San Francisco Bay Area schools to Free Software, 2 schools already under way.
• You can see our project page here http://groups.fsf.org/wiki/Free_Software_for_Bay_Area_schools!
• Lots of ways for both technical & non-technical people to help.
• contact Christian Einfeldt at einfeldt at gmail dot com if you want to help.

GNU Classpath

• Development of a Free Software clean room implementation of the Java class libraries.
• See http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath and http://developer.classpath.org/mediation/StudentProjects for projects (originally created for Google Summer of Code)
• Contact Andrew John Hughes for more information.

GNU plotutils

• GNU plotutils is a tool to make graphs based on x,y coordinates. One limitation is that it doesn't understand dates or times. It just understands plain numbers. So, if you want one of the axis of the graph to be a set of dates, these dates have to be converted to plain numbers. For example, in en.swpat.org's progress charts (try [1] or [2]), dates are converted into the number of seconds that have passed since January 1st 1970 - the "Unix epoch". This succeeds in making a graph whose points are in the correct places on the x axis, but the date in this format is meaningless to humans ("May 4th 2009", having been converted to a number of seconds, is "1.241 x 10⁹"). So here's the task: make GNU plotutils capable of displaying data as a human readable date. This doesn't require GNU plotutils to be able to accept dates in human readable format. That would be another nice feature, but users can already arrange this by using 'date' to convert a human readable date to other formats (such as the number of seconds since Jan 1st 1970). ...but there's nothing users can do to cause GNU plotutils to display dates in nice ways such as "May 4th 2009" instead of "1.241 x 10⁹", so that task is for someone who'd like to do some development work on GNU plotutils.