Project Outreach, Reply to Nominate your Project

[Paul Hahn]

This was originally posted to the dev list, but I am copying it here
to get some more participation.  Thanks, PSH.


Greetings,


Earlier this year Ed and I got together and planned out the next 6
months of PLUG-Dev meetings. We have posted the results to this forum
and are working to keep the PLUG web site up-to-date, so that everyone
knows what is going on. It is our hope that by doing this, interest in
PLUG Development activities will increase.

For your reference, future meetings are as follows:

* March: MV-Proc and Project Outreach
* April: DBUS Presentation
* May: Debian Package Management Presentation
* June: Discussion on source code control systems
* July:  Project Outreach Pizza Party (hackfest or presentation on
work accomplished)

One of the ideas that I hope will increase interest has been dubbed
"Project Outreach". Project Outreach is a way for PLUG-dev to give
back to the larger Linux community. This project involves PLUG
adopting a free software project and contributing our time to making
it better.

The first item of business for Project Outreach is to nominate
projects. The nominated projects will be evaluated at the March
PLUG-dev meeting by meeting participants and a winner (or maybe two)
will be selected by secret ballot (this means you should show up to
the March meeting if you want to vote for your favorite project).

So, at this time we are looking for project nominations. The project's
nominated should meet the following criteria:

* The project should be a project that appeals to a broad base of PLUG members.

* The project should be in a state where improvement, or addition, is need.

* The project should need contributions from people of varying skill
levels (A complicated kernel driver for your proprietary hardware
would not be a good option for a project).

* We are looking for projects in programming languages typically used
by GNU Linux developers. This means C, C++, PHP, Python, Perl, etc.

* The project must be free software, it should meet Debian inclusion guidelines.


Project Outreach means that future meetings will involve more than
just listening to presentations (although we will still have them, as
per the schedule). It means PLUG-dev members will be rolling up our
sleeves during hackfest's. We need more than just coders at these
hackfests, however. Free and open source projects need translation,
documentation, design work, beta testing, packaging, and bug fixing.
These are talents that many PLUG members, whether experienced
developers, beginning developers, or brand new users, can contribute
to.

As mentioned previously, we hope to vote on which projects we wish to
adopt for Project Outreach during the second portion of the March
PLUG-Dev meeting (in one week's time). Before we can do that, we need
your nominations. So, think about what projects would benefit from our
future work. Then reply to this post with your nominations. You may
nominate as many projects as you wish. If you wish to vote for a
nomination, you must show up at the March meeting.


Thanks for your support,


Paul Hahn