Summer of Code/2014/native/Bulletin Board

About You
What is your name?

My name is Nazrul Haque Athar, and I am a 2nd year undergraduate student at International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Hyderabad.

What is your email address?

My E-mail address is findathar@gmail.com

What is your Sugar Labs wiki username?

Native

What is your IRC nickname on irc.freenode.net?

native

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

My language of communication is English and I am comfortable with Hindi too.

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

Since I reside in India, the time difference in UTC and IST being +0530Hrs, I usuallly work from afternoon to midnight but is adjustable.

'''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? '''

Being a dedicated user of the open source softwares such as Apache HTTP, Linux, etc, I have started contibuting to FOSS.Since I have now familiarized with software and web development, I thought of contributing to FOSS with sugarlabs being my first contribution towards FOSS.

About your project
What is the name of your project?

Bulletin-Board

'''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?'''

The project Bulletin Board is all about learning by promoting interaction among users in a fun manner replacing the traditional forum discussions. Learning through interaction and easy resource sharing over any activity is sought to achieve in this project. The project will be coded using gtk3 and python. The project comprises of two major tools:


 * A shared, persistent "clipboard" of artifacts being used collectively within the project. This provides a space for sharing in each activity where users can provide supporting material for the underlying activity. In other words it provides a temporary storage area for objects which will support healthy interaction among users and with which users will get to learn about various unknown functionalities in activity.It also serves as a place to share interesting things and promotes group sharing.


 * A chat channel overlaid on any activity promoting topic wise ot targetted discussions. Bulletin Board will provide a spatially contextual chatting interface comprising of chat bubbles thoughout the screen unlike the old discussion forums. This promotes interaction among users in a fun and interesting way on topics concerned to the users. It will also help naive users to familiarize themselves with the functioning of the activity with detailed descriptions of the funcitonalities given by experienced users.

Link to Project Details - http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Human_Interface_Guidelines/The_Laptop_Experience/Bulletin_Boards

'''What is the timeline for development of your project? The Summer of Code work period is from May 19 - August 22; tell us what you will be working on each week. (As the summer goes on, you and your mentor will adjust your schedule, but it's good to have a plan at the beginning so you have an idea of where you're headed.) Note that you should probably plan to have something "working and 90% done" by the midterm evaluation (27 June); the last steps always take longer than you think, and we will consider cancelling projects which are not mostly working by then.'''

'''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.'''

As part of college coursework and few organizations I have participated in various projects with strict deadlines. The competitive atmosphere in our college(IIIT-H) makes one follow the schedule strictly and strict deadlines results in a timely completed task with good quality work. The projects completed successfully are listed below:


 * Built the admin panel of the organization "Fasket" and is now a part of it and head all the technical works in it.   Link - http://www.fasket.com/

Link - https://github.com/native93/Isas
 * Built an Isas portal which allows students to view their grades, SGPA, CGPA and register for courses at the start of each session and various other features. The project was built using web2py and python.

Link - https://github.com/native93/Audio-manipulator
 * Built an audio manipultor for modulation, mixing, amplification, etc of wave file. The project was built using gtk and pyaudio module.

Link - https://github.com/native93/TCP-UDP_FileTransferProtocol
 * Built TCP and UDP Application Level file sharing protocol with support for upload/download and indexed searching as part of networks coursework.


 * WSD portal : The Project is about forming rules of translation between English and Hindi using word sense disambiguation (WSD). A rich gaming interface was built to collect data from the user in a highly interactive manner using web2py and python as part of Software Engineering coursework. Link - https://github.com/native93/WSD

Link - https://github.com/native93/OpenGl-DirtBike-3D
 * Built a 3D game in Opengl as part of Graphics coursework in C++.

Link - https://github.com/native93/Linux-Teminal
 * Built a terminal in C simlar to linux terminal as part of operating system coursework.


 * Built a reddit like application as part of college coursework. Link - https://github.com/native93/reddit

I am familiar with python from nearly past two years and have also used gtk in few of my projects. I am comfortable with python now and I am good in learning things and can grasp new concepts and work quickly towards completion of project within the time boundation.

You and the 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.'''

The project Bulletin board is all about promoting interaction among users within an activity in a fun and interesting manner. The chat overlay component would allow users to freely comminicate and assist other users with the underlying functionalities of the activity. It can also be moderated by a user representing a teacher familiar with the underlying activity. Persistent clipboard will provide a sharing space for the users where users can share interesting things with a group of people. This will inturn promote learning within a group and better understanding of the underlying activity.

Learning is not a solo sport. Sugar enhances opportunities for collaboration among its learners. However, that tends to be on an activity-by-activity basis. The bulletin board will enable learners to work on projects across multiple activities, developing skills that will hopefully transfer to life outside of school. --Walter (talk) 16:52, 19 March 2014 (EDT)

Would be good for us have this missing piece in the collaboration plan, allowing a better experience when working in projects as a group.--Godiard (talk) 09:55, 21 March 2014 (EDT)

What will you do if you get stuck on your project and your mentor isn't around?

If I am stuck at any point, I usually try to figure it out myself on the web but if unsuccessful I will get in touch with other contributors in sugar labs. If problem persists, I will drop a mail in the mailing list and will focus on other aspect of the project until I find a solution to it.

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?

I have a habit of writing reports every one or two weeks on the project I work on mentioning the progress made till date, problems faced and solutions found to it and also the future plans. This way the community will be aware about the progress of the project.

Miscellaneous
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 "logout".



Send us a link to a pull request or merge request you have made on a Sugar or Sugar activity bug.

Commits and pr :

Commit - Pippy : added hot keys

Fixes Ticket #4661 : Output of program not displayed

 enhancement Calculate

ticket #4735 : Size issue Calculate

Describe a great learning experience you had as a child.

In my childhood I used to do a lot of experiment with various chemicals in lab but one day my friend was harmed due to an unexpected reaction due to my experiments. That day I learnt that one should never skip the instructions given.