Proposal for Google Summer of Code 2017

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Personal Information

Name: Vaibhav Maheshwari

Email: vaibhav.dkm@gmail.com

Website: www.vaibhavgeek.tech

Github: https://github.com/vaibhavgeek

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vaibhav-maheswhari-407aaa88/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/vaibhavgeek

Education:Integrated Master of science(MSc) in Maths(2015-20),

Sardar Vallabhbhai National Institute of Technology, Surat

India

Time Zone: Indian Standard Time (GMT +5:30)

About Me

I am passionate about programming and have been programming since I was 14 years old. I have tried to build 2 startups in last 5 years and they have won few awards. I have been developing in Ruby on Rails for last 2 years now.

Previous Projects

I've done some long-term projects with my time.

• https://github.com/vaibhavgeek/edunova: Edunova is a social, game based and community based learning platform which enables student to connect with each other and learn through games. It uses Machine Learning to personalize the learner's experience. This application was built on Ruby on Rails and Bootstrap.
• https://github.com/vaibhavgeek/friendyoke: Friendyoke was a social networking website which enabled people to connect with each other. I made this website in the year 2008, at that time in India, facebook was still gaining traction and other social networking websites were not even known. This website was built on top of ASP.NET, C# and Telerik Tools.
• https://github.com/sumedh123/ihack: This project was about using smart contracts and blockchain to create a research journal instead of traditional system of publishing of research papers. (Link to Blog post)

More projects can be viewed on my github profile mentioned above.

Project Description

There are multiple themes I would like to explore with my project. They are as followed.

1. Facebook, Google, Twitter Omniauth Login. This would enable users to sign in and sign-up with single click and would save them the trouble of typing the username and passwords every time. I have had some experience with omniauth and login with social networks feature in website.
2. Wiki discussion - This would enable the person leave comments on a certain text of research note (the way it occurs on medium posts). This would make the wiki pages far more interactive and reader-friendly. I have also seen a lack negligence towards editor in new research note section. Given the notes are always lengthy, having a full-screen editor makes a lot more sense. Apart from this I would complete everything listed in GSOC section of GSOC Ideas listed there. (https://publiclab.org/wiki/gsoc-ideas#Wiki+discussion)

Timeline

I plan to allocate at least 40 hours per week on this project and share weekly progress updates with the community.

Pre SOC period: I would work on understanding authlogic and omniauth and thus improving some of the features on the website. I plan to create omniauth social login along with authlogic. (Facebook, Twitter and Google)

May 5 -- May 30: I plan to allocate most of the time understanding the architecture, and working on improving the personal profile page of the user such as edit profile, completion of user profile and forgot password scenario if the user has signed up using a social network.

May 30 -- June 30: I plan to allocate at least 40 hours per week on this project and share weekly progress updates with the community. This would include start working on text-rich editor which would allow

July 1 -- July 24: I plan to allocate at least 40 hours per week on this project and share weekly progress updates with the community.

July 24 -- August 21: Completing the rich wiki editors and having a better system to comment on certain section of notes and retain the old comments also.

August 21 -- September 5: Adding the final documentation and tests, and cleaning the code. Looking into the community feedback and make sure everything is in place and is working. Preparing for End-term evaluation.

Needs

I do not have many any exceptional needs for my project. I would require some guidance and help from the mentor to understand the project properly.

Setup

I have cloned the repository on my github account (https://github.com/vaibhavgeek/plots2/). I have not set it up on any cloud service but I have set it up locally and it seems running fine on the local server.

I have already made my first contribution, where I changed the login structure to allow login of the person with username as well as email. I also wrote a unit test to check if my code worked properly. It was merged successfully with the master repository.

(https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/pull/1350)

Experience

I have worked on 4 to 5 Ruby on Rails projects till now (~ 2 years of experience in Rails) which were similar to what Public Lab would require in this project. You can have a look at those projects on my github profile. My project edunova.io had been selected by Government of India to be showcased at Digital India Expo held at New Delhi, India. It won a cash prize of 1543.05 dollars there. I am highly motivated towards projects of social cause such as education, healthcare and climate change.

Teamwork

I have been a part of many teams, both in leadership in-charge and working under someone. I have tried my best to deliver as the work and my job role required me to do. I have been to many hackathons where I was usually a part of 3-4 team.

Passion

I have been involved in creating social platforms and working on educational platforms for the people. One of the most important things that I have realized is that any platform thrives only because of active engagement of people. I have closely studied tactics applied by different organizations to retain users on their own websites.

PublicLab has the benefit of organizing physical meetups which thus enables PublicLab to create a curated and exclusive set of people enthusiastic about serving a cause. My aim of doing this project to enable a proper channel of communication on this curated platform. My previous projects may have gained some popularity in startup expos but failed miserably to gain traction real-time.

Working on a project which has community building based on ground traveling and creating an architecture for them which would be used by loads of people is something that excites me a lot.

Audience

This is something which I think about a lot. That which sector is good enough to spend time or resources in. Whether one should build something that is only to appease the rich and has a lot of commercial value or to build something that helps in creating a social impact and though may not have immediate financial benefits. I would choose the later choice as my passion is my driving factor behind my work.

My target audience is always the one which needs technical intervention to improve productivity in magnitude of a huge factor. It does not matter if the number of people is less or few.

Commitment

No, I don't have any commitments between 23 May, 2016 to 30 Aug, 2016.