This summer I have so much work I want to do on the Sakai Open Source Learning Management System (LMS) that I could use some help. I am hoping to find a few designers and/or developers to help me so I can make even more progress. These are unpaid positions – kind of like an unpaid internship. If all goes well, at the end of the summer you will have made real contributions to an open source project and your contributions will be in GitHub. My preference is students in the Ann Arbor or mid-Michigan area this summer so we can spend some time together.

We will meet weekly over the summer and I will buy lunch or dinner. It is not essential that everyone is in North Quad all the time – but I would like to work co-located “startup-style” at least one day per week over the Summer. While I do not have any funding at all – if things go well, we might find some way to get one or more of the students in this program to come to Open Apereo 2015 in early June.

The real goal is for everyone in the group to make real contributions to the trunk source code of Sakai. I will act as your Mentor, review your code and make sure it is committed into the trunk:

https://github.com/sakaiproject/sakai

If we move quickly your code will make the Sakai-11 code freeze in late June.

I have a wide range of tasks that include:

– Adding new small features to existing tools
– Rewriting several of the smaller tools (we call these synoptic tools)
– Improving the UI/UX across all of the tools to align with our new responsive UI (code named Morpheus)
– Building whole new prototype proof-of-concept UI/UX designs
– Improving the performance of Sakai hosted in the cloud

I will adapt the tasks to the each of the skill sets of the people who are selected for the program. These are the skill sets that I need:

– CSS
– JavaScript
– Java
– SQL

Some of the projects are mostly CSS/JavaScript while others require back-end code in Java/SQL. One way or another I want to come up with something that you will produce that will be production quality and part of Sakai going forward.

I want folks who can commit a significant amount of time to this effort to make it worthwhile. The work will be done in the open and the Sakai developer and user list will be informed of progress – so you do not have to join the group just to be informed.

Here is a form to apply to my Summer of Sakai.

http://goo.gl/forms/IFzGXqZBBH

Depending on the level of interest, I may adjust my ideas as to how to do this. If we get a lot of talented folks interested that cannot make it to Ann Arbor – I may to try to find more mentors. After all Sakai is an open project and I should be open to better ways of doing what I want to do this summer.