Summer of Code/2013/Social Sugar

What is your name?
Akshit Khurana

What is your email address?
[mailto:axitkhurana@gmail.com axitkhurana@gmail.com]

What is your Sugar Labs wiki username?
Axitkhurana

What is your IRC nickname?
axitkhurana on freenode/OFTC

What is your primary language?
(We have mentors who speak multiple languages and can match you with one of them if you'd prefer.)

English and Hindi

Where are you located, and what hours do you tend to work?
(We also try to match mentors by general time zone if possible.)

I am located in Delhi, India 5:30+GMT. I usually tend to work approximately from noon to mid night.

Have you participated in an open-source project before?
''If so, please send us URLs to your profile pages for those projects, or some other demonstration of the work that you have done in open-source. If not, why do you want to work on an open-source project this summer?''

I contributed to openSUSE's popcorn project during GSoC 2012. Popcorn collects anonymous data about usage of RPM packages. I implemented various features including making data collection anonymous, packaging client RPM, implement a simple RESTful API, integration of client in settings user interface (YaST). Source code is available on github. My contributions are under username axitkhurana.

Also, working towards a small patch for TOR's stem library.

Project description
''What is the name of your project? Describe your project in 10-20 sentences. What are you making? Who are you making it for, and why do they need it? What technologies (programming languages, etc.) will you be using?''

Social Sugar project involves development of GUI components that can help bring user's social interactions on external platforms into Sugar.

Various parts of Sugar like the Group view could utilize these actions outside Sugar to increase interaction and learning inside the Sugar platform. Services like to be built Project Sharing Website can be deeply integrated into Sugar.

Some of the ideas include:
 * Connected accounts for different services.
 * Mini profiles in Group view.
 * Expanded profiles having more description of interaction on different services.
 * Sharing of actions inside sugar (new projects) to external networks.

Specific to Project Sharing Website integration points can include:
 * Recent/popular projects of kids in profiles.
 * Sync project data automatically to server as private to user only to view projects online.
 * Sugar activity for browsing groups galleries and projects

Timeline
''What is the timeline for development of your project? The Summer of Code work period is June 17 - September 23; tell us what you will be working on each week.''

My Backround
''Convince us, in 5-15 sentences, that you will be able to successfully complete your project in the timeline you have described. This is usually where people describe their past experiences, credentials, prior projects, schoolwork, and that sort of thing, but be creative. Link to prior work or other resources as relevant.''

I’m studying Computer Science, 4th year at Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee. I have a decent amount of experience in web development in Python and Web Frameworks like Django and Flask.

My contribution to openSUSE's popcorn project during GSoC 2012, involved development in Python, Flask and SQLAlchemy with attention to PEP 8 compliant code. We used Travis CI for continuous integration and Git for version control and collaboration.

I am a part of Information Management Group, in IIT Roorkee, which is a student body responsible for developing and managing all Internet and Intranet applications in IIT Roorkee, including the institute website and registration & placement portals. One of the projects I have worked at IMG is Softwares application. It's available on the intranet but Mid development demo is hosted on heroku

I have contributed to Entrepreneurship Development Cell, IIT Roorkee's Django based website in 2011-12 which is hosted on Amazon EC2 Cloud. The code is available on Github and the website was featured on Django website showcase

SnapApp was a hobby project, I worked on for playing with Facebook API and Django's manage.py custom commands. It creates albums from photos from your Facebook account.

Impact on the Sugar Labs community
''If your project is successfully completed, what will its impact be on the Sugar Labs community? Give 3 answers, each 1-3 paragraphs in length. The first one should be yours. The other two should be answers from members of the Sugar Labs community, at least one of whom should be a Sugar Labs GSoC mentor. Provide email contact information for non-GSoC mentors.''

Sharing seamlessly from inside Sugar with other networks will increase collaboration. It will complement other projects like Project Sharing Website as well.

Social interaction is a key element in the learning process, therefore we should promote this. - tch

Sugar pilot deployment
''Sugar Labs will be working to set up a small (5-30 unit) Sugar pilot near each student project that is accepted to GSoC so that you can immediately see how your work affects children in a deployment. We will make arrangements to either supply or find all the equipment needed. Do you have any ideas on where you would like your deployment to be, who you would like to be involved, and how we can help you and the community in your area begin it?''

It would be great if we could set up a pilot deployment at Anushruti, which is the first school for the deaf in India in an Hi-Tech Institute of National Importance. It is situated inside my college, IIT Roorkee, and I can help with setting up by coordinating with Sugar and the school, as our student group, Information Management Group, helped with their website design. Sugar's clean collaborative platform would really improve the learning environment there.

What will you do if you get stuck on your project and your mentor isn't around?
Try to solve the problem myself. If I am unable to and if it isn't urgent, I'll send an email and work on something else. If it is I'll try to get help from other people in the community on IRC or mailing list.

Keeping the community informed about problems and questions
How do you propose you will be keeping the community informed of your progress and any problems or questions you might have over the course of the project?

Blogging and posting weekly progress on the group with any problems.

Screenshot of my Sugar development environment
''We want to make sure that you can set up a development environment before the summer starts. Please send us a link to a screenshot of your Sugar development environment with the following modification: when you hover over the XO-person icon in the middle of Home view, the drop-down text should have your email in place of "Restart." See the image on the right for an example. It's normal to need assistance with this, so please visit our IRC channel, #sugar on irc.freenode.net, and ask for help.''



What is your t-shirt size?
(Yes, we know Google asks for this already; humor us.)

Large (L)

Describe a great learning experience you had as a child.
It was Christmas time and my mom got me this gift with Santa in a water filled glass cover with sparkling glitter. I kept in the freezer, I don't remember why, but the next morning, I found that it was broken. It was sad, but I learned water expands on freezing instead of contracting. Years later studied the hydrogen bonded crystalline structure in 11th class as well.

Additional information
Is there anything else we should have asked you or anything else that we should know that might make us like you or your project more?