Farallon Geographics applied to Google Summer of Code for the Arches project (ArchesProject.org). We are excited to announce that we have been approved to be a mentoring organization!
We are looking forward to an exciting summer with awesome contributions from students from the international community.
What is Google Summer of Code?
Google invites students from all over the world, to come up with interesting, non-trivial problems/solutions or enhancements for some of the most important open-source projects and work on them over the summer. Participants get support from the community plus a mentor who and acts as their primary guide to help them stay on track to meet their goals.
Farallon mentors and subject area resources
In addition to a primary mentor, students also receive help from Farallon Geographics subject-area experts including experts in front-end/JavaScript, Python, geospatial database developers, web development and Elasticsearch. CEO Dennis Wuthrich (the architect of Arches) will help students to understand the project and how their efforts can impact the wider Cultural Heritage community. This is an incredible opportunity for students to get involved with the Arches project and get technical mentoring along the way.
How to get involved
First, review the ‘Ideas for Improving Arches’ project ideas page. The ideas there are meant as starting points. Students are encouraged to review these ideas in much more detail and then give their suggestions and even detailed plans on how they want to proceed. Feel free to add your ideas to list in the Arches community discussion forum.
What skills are needed to work on these ideas?
As long as you’re interested in cultural heritage and are not completely new to web programming, you should check out the project. You’ll have a leg up if you know Python for server-side development and JavaScript plus standard CSS3/HTML5 knowledge for front-end development. Familiarity with Django and/or with Model-View-Controller (MVC) patterns is helpful, as is familiarity with JSON, which is used for data transfer between client and server
Farallon knows that students love Open Source software, maps and flip flops. The Arches project and the Google Summer of Code could be your ticket to summer paradise.
About the Arches Project
Arches is a modern, user-friendly, open source information system created to help organizations inventory and manage heritage places of all types. It is a solution that is both applicable and relevant to a broad spectrum of heritage organizations all over the world, while also incorporating complex functions such as semantic ontology, graph database, elastic search and built-in mechanisms to enforce data standards.
