Systers: Women in Computing

Web Page: http://systers.org/systers-dev/doku.php/soc010

Mailing List: http://systers.org/mailman/listinfo/systers-dev

Systers (http://www.systers.org ) is an international community of over 3,000 women involved in technical-computing. The community developed a custom version of Mailman, that includes a thread subscribe and unsubscribe feature and the ability to self-add alternate email addresses. Systers was founded by Anita Borg in 1987 as a small electronic mailing list for women in “systems”. Today, Systers broadly promotes the interests of women in the computing and technology fields. Dr. Borg created Systers to “increase the number of women in computer science and make the environments in which women work more conducive to their continued participation in the field.” The Systers community serves this purpose by providing women a private space to seek advice from their peers, and discuss the challenges they share as women technologist.

Projects

• Create Mailman 3.0 UI Develop and implement a UI for the upcoming Mailman 3.0. This includes design of DB for UI used in Django, building Django models, templates and views and different kinds of testing.
• Erica Wolfe GSOC 2010 Systers application - bug fixes and wishlist items I am a first-year graduate student in Information Systems (a joint business and computer science program) at New York University. I have many years of non-technical work experience, but I'm just starting out as a programmer and would love to get involved in the open-source and Systers communities. I propose working on bug fixes and wishlist items for existing features as they seem best suited to my experience and a great way to learn the Systers code, Mailman and Python.
• Mailman Authentication using MM data The idea basically aims keeping in mind about Mailman 3.0 and that could be used as a plugin and compatible with the different kind of frame works to be used with it.Basically here will be to create a Open ID system something similar to how Google accounts are managed and with the single sign on , one can access the Google products.Use of Redundant Open ID only to restrict for systers site.
• Mailocate - Implementing Archive Search Capabilities in Mailman Mailman archiving is quite rudimentary and searching is non existent. People have to rely on Google or other mail archival sites. In this project I will attempt to add search features by implementing a searching and indexing engine. I will also make a proof of concept search feature in mailman allowing users to try out the framework. More front end improvements can be made later on. Finally, a script will be made to index already existing archives.
• Patches, Release and Testing Automation for Systers-Mailman The existing Systers code is a branch rather than in patch form, making it hard to test on various Operating systems like Debian, Fedora, and even between two releases of Ubuntu8.04 and Ubuntu9.10 it will be harder to test and debug. This proposal aims to introduce automation into the development cycle so that new releases are compatible with upstream development cycles. The BZR Launchpad CVS has a very nice system of PPA which can be utilized for release control and documentation too.
• Proposal for Improved Display of and Statistics on Archives I'd like to work on enhancing Mailman's archives, or more specifically, on generating member statistics, info, and visualizations of such with Google Charts and/or SVG. I'd also like to focus on building a better display for the Mailman Archives, with all messages within a thread being aggregated on a single page. There will be options for flat/nested modes as well as collapsing of messages.