Summer of Code/2018/Making a Beginner Guide

Google Summer of Code 2018 Project Proposal

Project Name: Beginner's Guide | Developer’s dashboard | Sugarbot

Mentors

Jaskirat Singh

Hrishi Patel

Rishabh Thaney

Shivang Shekhar

Samson Goddy

Abdulazeez Abdulazeez

My Profile

Name: Pratul Kumar

University: The LNM Institute of Information and Technology

Course: B.Tech. in Communication and Computer Engineering

Year: 2nd year (4th semester)

Email: pratulkumar1997@gmail.com

Telephone: +91-8107525493

IRC: Pratul1997

SugarLabs wiki UserName: Pratul1997

Github: Pratul1997

Linkedin: pratul1997

Facebook: Pratul1997

Languages: English, Hindi

Time-Zone: Jaipur, India UTC+5:30 (Kolkata)

Open Source Contribution

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?

Yes I have been contributing to Open Source since September 2017.

Organisations :

Sugarlabs
CybrosX (Open-Source Organisation of my college Computer Club)
I am managing one Open-Source organization of my college.

MozLNMIIT

LNMHacks 2.0 Website( LNMHacks is the Hackathon conducted by LNMIIT in November )
Pull-Request-and-Hacktoberfest( To promote Open Source Contribution during October )

My first Pull request: Removed Material CSS #14
Open Source is a self-learning and motivational path for me and I want to completely indulge in this practice for 3 months during this summer.

The Project

Abstract

To make a beginners guide for SugarLabs, a platform to guide them to start contributing and to taking care of FAQ’s like :

Where to start?
What to start?
How to start?
Where to submit?

Convert the markdown and grasp the content from different current documentations and bring all that information to a single place.
The goal is to help new developers to settle easily into the SugarLabs world and provide a centralized documentation portal.
Make a dashboard for the users so that they can get to know about their developed and developing areas, track the projects, their progress and performance. Their contribution could also be seen by the other users, earning them respect in the society.

Dashboard

The Dashboard would contain user’s basic information ( like email address, name, handles etc. ) and would allow him to easily share his work and/or collaborate with others.
The dashboard can be logged in with Google ID, Github or Facebook ( more login options like single login providers like OneLogin and login using StackOverflow / StackExchange network ID may also be added if needed in future ).
These details would be shared as per the privacy settings of the user where he can decide what information will be visible to which audience(a feature of user groups could be added in future).
The user would be able to bookmark the articles of the guide or add them to “read later” for future reference and access them from his dashboard whenever he needs.
Login won’t be compulsory to view the documentation.

Technologies Used: NodeJS, JavaScript, Jquery, Bootstrap

Badge Feature in Dashboard

The documentation will be on the right side. The left side will contain navigation bar and links.
There would be a button at the end of each page so when the user has completed a certain portion of the documentation he can press the button to confirm the completion and the progress would be reflected on his dashboard as a badge(certain stars will appear on his profile).
Newcomers would be engaged in this and they would also be able to share their badges on social media. So this also adds to promotion and publicity of Sugarlabs.
The user could log in by pressing “Sign In” option and sign into his dashboard with his registered credentials.
In case the user is not logged-in, he will be prompted to login so that the badge gets added to his account.

Add Shortcuts

This feature is to ease the navigation and readability for the user.
This will help in several ways:

If the user can’t read some part at that moment.
If he feels some part is important to keep bookmarked for future.
To help other users to get started in the community in very quick manner.

A button at the top right will be provided to integrate one-click easy shortcut addition to his dashboard.

Technologies used: Bootstrap, JavaScript, NodeJs

Sugarbot

I propose to integrate a bot, called SugarBot with Sugarlabs GitHub repositories.
Sugarbot will keep track of the git repositories and issues being opened, and when a label ( like easy, medium, hard, GCI, GSoC etc. ) is being attached to them by the repo maintainer.
The bot will automatically reflect issues according to their labels within the corresponding group on the page(a part of our newcomer's guide).
If the newcomer wants to start contributing right away, he can view the list of issues label-wise and choose them according to difficulty level and required the skill set and start working.
Skills need to work and implement the Sugarbot concept:

https://developer.github.com/v3/issues/#list-issues
https://github.com/nodejs/github-bot
To retrieve data from Developer Github API, JSON knowledge needed.
The inspiration of ideas are from to:

Certain Featured bots who perform the similar tasks:

For connection with IRC we will utilize errbot

Skills Required: NodeJs, JSON, XML, Javascript or Python

Risks

Risk #1: your beginner guide does not help a beginner

Currently Sugar Labs has multiple newcomer guides in the forms of a book, Sugar Wiki, and sugardoc, GCI Starter.
I will try to bring the content of all these resources at sugardoc using sphinx with classic to convert markdown to HTML(then to pdf as needed). Another alternative to display content on our dashboard is using ReadtheDoc Embed feature.
Now instead of having multiple newcomer guide resources, we can add all the resources in one place, removing other resources of newcomer guide.
I have large student community at my college. I have a thought of organizing Sugar Labs online seminar, where we can guide them about Open Source contribution, and direct them to the newcomer guide.
I could take their feedback and improve the guide further. In case many students are facing the same problem, I’ll try to find the reason and resolve it.
Further as only markdown will be used as new-comer guide, other resources have been removed, the community won't need to devote their time in maintaining multiple guides.

Risk #2; Beginner guide conflicts with other information

Markdown would be utilized, an example used by other organization.
Only open-source software and technologies like Bootstrap, Angular, NodeJs, Material etc will be used.
Sphinx also provides the feature to convert the documentation to pdf format.
Remove information from the current existing guide and put the link to new guide at those places and linked properly for proper navigation.

Risk #3; your beginner guide is abandoned soon after publishing

I would like to work on this project even after GSoC period gets over. I see a huge possibility of exploration of Sugarbot and I will try to keep updating guide and keep working on Sugarbot to make things automated and easy as long as I can.
As there is the only one source of newcomer documentation which is sugar doc and markdown is used there, so it will be easy for everyone to update it on Github repository. We will also add a page with the contributor on Sugar Doc where we can list the name of developers who contributed to Sugardoc and other projects. Also as it will be the only source documentation so the risk of "Rarely do new people begin to edit" is also removed. The developers can showcase their contribution on that page so it is sort of social reward for them by Sugarlabs.
As for the contributor who is not comfortable with Github, a part about getting started with Github will also be there in the newcomer guide. Link to basic syntax of https://www.markdowntutorial.com/ and GitHub and such links will also be there. There will also be badges when you complete this part. It will attract the contributor to learn Github and its task. After there learning they can also contribute to Sugarlabs through Github.

Timeline

GSoC is typically about 12 weeks long, with an additional 25 days of community bonding period.
The evaluation is in three phases viz. Phase I, Phase II and Phase III. I have divided my workflow accordingly.
Further I have divided the features by their “difficulty level” and “time requirement” and decided the sequence of implementation of features in each phase accordingly.

Brief description of each phase :

Phase I: During this phase, I’ll work on the features which can be implemented in less time and don’t involve too much complexity. This would include things like the dashboard feature and the newcomer's guide.
Phase II: This phase will consist of features which have medium difficulty and also one or two harder level features which require more time, such that implementing and testing the newcomers guide and improving it according to the feedback input. Emphasis would be made on testing the implemented features during this period. Dashboard for badges will also be incorporated during this phase.
Phase III: During the final phase, I will devote my time mainly on the harder to implement features and the ones left out from Phase I and Phase II. I’ll again focus on making the newcomers guide even better, test it on different screen sizes like mobile phones, tablets, and computers, so as to make sure that it is responsive enough on all the types of devices. Will also work to add Sugarbot to the newcomer guide.

Time Frame	Start Date - End Date	Task
Community Bonding	April 24 - April 30	Gather information about all SugarLabs project and their dependencies Try to install those Sugar Labs project on my local machine In case of any problem will try to contact the project maintainer
	May 1 - May 6	Learn NodeJs in more depth which will be required for implementing the Sugarbot
	May 7 - May 13	A lot of discussions with the community, discussions with mentors on an implementation of features whose reference links I was unable to find. If my mentor thinks I am ready to start then I’ll start working on Phase I
Phase I	May 14 - May 20	Start making Dashboard
	May 21 - May 27	Addition Privacy feature to the dashboard
	May 28 - June 03	Start work on newcomers/beginners Guide
	June 04 - June 10	Use Bootstrap to make the beginner guide responsive
	June 11 - June 17	Add JQuery to make the newcomers guide more interactive
Phase II	June 18 - June 24	Remove extra components of Bootstrap and Jquery (prepare the minimized bootstrap and JQuery) to make our website load faster
	June 25 - July 01	Start work on adding checkpoints after the suitable interval in the Guide.
	July 02 - July 08	Linking badge with the checkpoints so that when clicked the badges get reflected in the user’s profile
	July 09 - July 15	Cleanup of code and extensive testing
Phase III	July 16 - July 22	Work on Sugarbot which looks for labels and adds them to its database
	July 23 - July 29	Making the layout of issue section in the website to list all issues at a single place
	July 30 - August 05	Integrating latest 10 issues on the website
	August 06 - August 14	Extensive testing of newcomer guide and Sugarbot
After GSoC		Keep contributing to Sugarlabs and updating the newcomer's guide as the dependencies change or the project description changes. Help others to contribute to and use Sugar Labs projects. Work to improve and advance Sugarbot for a lot more automation. Serve as GCI mentor for this the above listed new projects and guide the new students to work on them.Take feedback from students during GCI about the current productivity of the dashboard and desirable new features to the newcomer guide. Linking of data analysis of the dashboard and also, add analysis of specific parts on which fewer badges were received.

Project and the community

If your project is successfully completed, what will its impact be on the Sugar Labs community?

If the project is successful it will be of huge help for new developers to SugarLabs as well as for establishing ones to get all the documentation at one place in a well-organized way. This will also give first-time users a pleasant experience as they won't have to figure out all the procedures by themselves.
FAQ’s like “How to download Sugar labs projects” and “how to start contributing” would be taken care of at a single place in an organized way.
To make it more user-friendly there would be testing as well as feedback and suggestions from the users and changes would be made accordingly.
Dashboard will bring all the community features at a single place and badges would reflect how much a user has used our documentation and of how much help it has been.
If there is some part of the documentation that is not completed by the majority of the newcomers, (this can be seen by the number of badges with the students) then more emphasis will be laid to that part for more refining.
Sugarbot will be a new project to Sugar labs which could be further expanded and embedded within our chatting and mailing channel.
In future, it could also be utilized for assigning issues thus increasing automation and productivity. There seems to be a lot of scope for Sugarbot’s expansion.

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

I will try to resolve the issue myself by looking it up on DuckDuckGo, StackOverflow etc.
Read the documentation of the tool in which problem occurs.
Contact other SugarLabs members through IRC, developer mailing lists
If the problem is still not resolved, I will engross myself on some other module to keep the things rolling and wait for my mentors to help me out.

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?

Convey daily work to my mentors
Daily updates on IRC
I will keep posting updates on my work on the developer mailing as per requirements
I'll update my weekly work on Github
Keep my work well documented for the community.

Other Commitments

Have you applied to other organization? No
Do you have plans to have any other job or internship during this period? No
Do you have any short-term commitment during this period? No
Do you have classes that overlap during this period?

My current semester will end on 5th May and next semester will start on 27th July.
During the vacation time, I can fully devote my time to this project. After my next semester starts I can manage to work for at least 4-6 hours a day.

Since when you have been part of the community?

I have been part of Sugarlabs community since October 2017.
I have also tried to serve as GCI mentor and guide new students, I will be part of Sugarlabs community even after completion of GSoC tenure.
I’ll try to keep on adding newer features and ideas to the project after GSoC as there are a few ideas in my mind ( like dashboard feature can be explored in the much better way in future like Season of KDE dashboard and certain other competitions like BOSS - Bountiful Open Source Summer) which can’t be implemented within the tenure of GSoC. I would like to work upon those ideas after GSoC.