GSoC-2010 Project Ideas

Here is a place to start collecting thoughts and ideas for potential projects which could be submitted as part of Google Summer (or Winter - depending on you hemispherial orientation) of Code (GSoC) 2010.
(I apologize if anything I've described here has actually already been implemented - it's a wiki, please fix it!)

Synchronization

Description

Sharing data between separate instances of Sahana. This might include such functionality as:

• Automated syncing
• Syncing via flash drive
• Creating rule to avoid conflicts
• Creating user friendly interface to resolve conflict
• Allowing an instance to either access a local DB or server DB depending on the connection
• Upgrading a local instance at the time of syncing (could this also be done if syncing by flashdrive?)
• Cleaning data and removing duplicate entries between versions.

Appeal

• Would allow Sahana to be used in environments without reliable internet.

Blue Prints

BluePrintSynchronisation

Interested Students

Amer Tahir - amertahir (at) gmail (dot) com

Interested Mentors

Michael Howden* - michael (dot) howden (at) gmail (dot) com

Survey Tool

Description

A tool to allow non-technical users to generate custom surveys and:

• Print the surveys and read the results through Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
• Allow the survey to be completed via SMS, or on an iPhone, Android, iPad, Abacus
• Generate pretty graphs & reports
• Perform analysis on the survey data (How's your Statistics?)
• Link survey results to maps
• Data visualization
• integration with SMS for SMS Surveys

​http://groups.google.com/group/GlobalWASHIMTools shows an example of a generic survey tool design for the Global WASH (Water Sanitation and Health) cluster (UNICEF, IR, Oxfam).

Appeal

• In the recovery period after disasters and crisis's, organizations need to collect information about affected people to plan activities better and to assess the impact of those activities. Surveys are also important prior to disasters to assess to vulnerability of populations and help them to better respond to hazards.
• This could involve playing with a bunch of cool technologies.

Blue Prints

• BluePrintOCR
• BluePrintReporting

Interested Students

Interested Mentors

Michael Howden*

GIS

Description

If you're happy to spend the 5K you get from google on a UAV - the sky's the limit.
Even if not there's still heaps of opportunities:

• Color coded maps according to Geo-data (threats, needs, etc)
• Placing variable sized markers on the map in proportion to data (number of people in camp, number of families needing food)
• Tracking people ( John Smith was registered at Camp A, then collected food at Camp B, then volunteers at Site C), or Items (The shipment of Tarpaulins moved from site C to site D, where it was split, and then half of them have been distributed from site E)
• Having a playable timeline slider (like ​http://haiti.ushahidi.com/main)
• Integrating Walking Papers (​http://walking-papers.org/) functionality into Sahana

Appeal

• Maps are where it's at

Blue Prints

BluePrintGeographicInformationSystems

Interested Students

Douglas Soares de Andrade (dsa) - dsandrade at gmail.com

Anil Kumar M - anil(dot)kumar(dot)848(at)gmail(dot)com

irc - mak89k

Interested Mentors

Fran Boon (flavour)

Importing Tool

Description

A generic importing tool, which allowed data to be imported from various sources automatically. This could include:

• Importing from PDF, XLS, HTML
• A User friendly interface to match fields
• Importing from "flat" tables to linked tables
• Methods of automatically (or with a user friendly interface) cleaning data

Appeal

• The data is out there, we need it in here.
• A large amount of Disaster Information Management is still done using Excel. To get people to start using Sahana, we need to give them the option of easily migrating all of that excel data.

Blue Prints

SpreadsheetImporter

Interested Students

Nitin Rastogi (IRC nick - codestasher)

Interested Mentors

Michael Howden*

Dashboard/Usability

Description

Create a dashboards with a slick interface to make :

• Integrate an electronic whiteboard feature with a Wii remote do display and manipulate information (eg. stock in warehouse, lists of requests, lists of people, vehicles)

Appeal

• Whiteboards are a highly used tool in disasters for managing information

Blue Prints

Interested Students

Interested Mentors

Michael Howden*

*Not all 4 - but am flexible.