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GSoC All Final Reports
Divya Upadhyay 2016
Jennifer Parak 2014
Julia Proft 2014
The Peace Corps have taken up the task of working with PCVs to educate the differently abled students of Guyana who are unable to hear. The volunteers identify such students in need and shall upload their location along with other necessary details on the Guyana Crowdsourcing portal. I worked on this project last year to build the portal using Ushahidi. For implementing GIS, integration of Google Glass with the Ushahidi Portal was desired. This shall serve to post images and videos of differently abled students on the map. Closed Captioning to aid communication using Glass shall also be implemented as a Glassware.
The project involved utilizing Google Glass, an OHMD to assist the PCVs in some of their activities in Guyana.
I built two user friendly and efficient glasswares for the accomplishment of the aims:
- Glassware for taking pictures, videos , tagging the media with location and title input through speech.
- Glassware for Closed Captioning
Link to my progress reports throughout the program.
It was a lot of fun building them!
Detailed report and links to code
Glass overheats a lot and also very quickly. This causes interruptions in usage, as it needs to cool down to properly function again. Also, as it heats up, it can be uncomfortable to wear. Towards the end of the summers, the reflective coating of Glass began to wear off due to heat and humidity.
The best take-away is the experience which is absolutely amazing. Working with an awesome and motivated community always kept me inspired. I am very grateful to my mentor Julia Proft for being amazingly supportive and helpful. It has been a pleasure to be her student. :)
I also thank Rose Robinson for her guidance and vision for this project. Last but not the least, Maybellin Burgos! Thank you for your commendable efforts for running this program so smoothly.
Once a Syster, always a Syster :) I love this community and I feel blessed to be a part of it. I am absolutely honored to have associated with Systers for two brilliant summers. The learnings from this experience have already changed my life in so many ways and will surely stay with me forever.
A year and a half ago, I signed up for the Systers Mailing List and I was always amazed how many clever and ambitious ladies working in the STEM industry were out there! I was always eager to find a way to contribute to Systers and give back to the community. Until the day I read that Systers Anita Borg Institute are going to be a Mentoring Organisation for Google Summer of Code 2014. That's when I knew I had to go for it!
On 21st April 2014 I received an E-Mail saying that I was accepted to work with the Anita Borg Institute during Google Summer of Code this year. I felt absolutely incredible! Having spent a lot of time researching and writing my project proposal, I was so ready to start coding.
...Now let's come back to 18th August 2014:
The Peace Corps Volunteers in Azerbaijan are using the online platform Ushahidi, to share information about resources and projects throughout the country. Myself and another intern - Julia Proft - were assigned to improve the usability of the site by tailoring the online platform according the needs and wants of the PCVs.
Referring to my timeline, my tasks ranged from editing the maps and improving the existing search and filtering functionalities to implementing a completely new functionality for PCVs to post new resources.
My weekly status reports can give you an idea of my the progress made during my Google Summer of Code and the challenges I had to face.
I managed to merge most of my code and I'm currently still working on a few requirements that require more fine-tuning. For further reference, please go to my Github Repository.
Naturally, I had to face a few challenges. Unfortunately, when the coding period started I was still in the middle of my end term exams, which meant that I could only start two weeks in. Furthermore, we had a few issues with our repository which meant that I was working on the wrong code at the beginning.
What's more, there were so many new things I had to learn such as the Kohana Framework used by the Ushahidi Platform. Kohana is a PHP5 framework using a MVC(Model-View-Controller)-architecture. It took some time getting used to the new framework, however, I learnt to appreciate its security, consistency and community-driven application.
Amongst all the challenges I was confronted with - the worst was that I was afraid of asking questions. I spend ages to understand how the test server worked, how to use the framework, when I could've just asked my mentors.
What I have learnt is that everyone is so welcoming and friendly in this community. After every weekly meeting, I was so happy to be a part of this. I am thrilled to see that each person is very supportive and ambitious and it's been such a great experience.
Apart from improving my coding skills, I learnt how to communicate effectively during Google Hangout meetings and how to adapt to people living in different time zones.
And even if there were times where I just wanted to throw my laptop out of the window and cry, the fact that I was working on such a meaningful projects and with such a great team kept me going!
All in all I can tell you this: I have never been so proud of what other people have managed to achieve. During the student demo last week I feel in love (literally) with the Open-Source-Community. I am absolutely positive that we can make a change, as there are so many clever girls and boys out there that are willing to support women who code.
The good thing is, it's not over yet. I realised that even if the official coding period ended, I still want to progress with my code, work on future user stories and help contribute more.
Thank you for everyone who participated and thanks so much to our Mentors who are volunteering to make this happen. Please add me on LinkedIn, follow me on Twitter and Google+ and let's stay in touch!
Now that it's the end of the summer, I feel tempted to write something about how the time spent doing Google Summer of Code passed far too quickly, and that I wish it wasn't over. But that's the beauty of GSoC and open source -- it's never really "over," and the time spent coding doesn't really "pass": it continues on in the contributions we have made. I am so amazed at everything the various Systers GSoC teams accomplished, and I find the students' dedication to their projects second to none. I am so grateful to have worked alongside them as well as all of the incredible mentors.
My project this summer was not without its challenges as I delved into Ushahidi and a web application framework that I had never before used (in fact, I had never used any back-end framework before). Also new to me was the model-view-controller architecture that Ushahidi uses, and it took me some time before I felt fully comfortable with that. But with some time, I was able to settle into a groove, and I accomplished all of the tasks I had listed on my timeline. Probably my most difficult task was creating a notification system that will keep users up-to-date on the latest posted material. I had to spend a lot of time working on and refining the logic of the notifications, but once I finally had everything working, I was ecstatic.
To me, the most important takeaway from Google Summer of Code is not so much the technical knowledge gained but rather the collaboration skills one learns from working with other students, mentors, and the community. Everyone has different insights and approaches to problems, and working on a team provides exposure to that cornucopia of ideas. Big thanks to my teammate Jennifer Parak and my mentors Angela Oduor and Linda Kamau (from Ushahidi) and Rose Robinson for making this summer absolutely fantastic! Also, another big thanks to both Systers and Peace Corps, whose partnership made this GSoC project possible.
For more information about me and this project, please visit my Systers wiki page, my GitHub page and the Systers Ushahidi repository, and my LinkedIn page.
Thanks for reading!