Project Ideas
From LDSOSS
If you have a clever idea that you think would make a great project, but you simply don't have the time to develop it yourself right now, write it down here. Perhaps someone else will have the resources to develop it, and could benefit from your idea.
Open source translation of LDS works. www.OpenLDS.org
I'd be curious to see a genealogy system combined with a PIM. Current contacts are different from genealogy name and contact (i.e., life event/attribute) information only in the sense that it's current rather than former. Birthdays for writing cards can be stored in Outlook, Evolution, or Mozilla Calendar (or whatever), but it's also genealogical data. I think a unified schema and/or UI and/or conversion tools could be very useful. - Thomas Palmer
What about a "Mormonification" of major open source projects. I think an LDS version of Mozilla's Firefox, with explicit content blocking built in (there is already an extension which does this) would be a truly useful piece of software. An LDS version of the drupal CMS could be tailored to include genealogy and family features. The end-all project would even be a mo-linux distribution.
Just a thought. - Brian Burnham (brianburnham at gmail dot com)
How about something to keep track of a scout troop/aaronic priesthood quorum? Something to keep track of rank advancements in both the Scout Program and Duty to God program. I think currently most wards shell out some cash for something like Troopmaster, but it'd be cool to have something like that that did both scouting and duty to god, and somehow allowed more collaboration, you know, beyond the one person who runs troopmaster in his den and occasionally remembers to print out reports for the rest of the leaders.
Scout Tracker (http://www.jaynorth.net/?view=scouttracker ), written by Jay North, is an opensource assistant for scout troops. It is under active development and has worked well for us. From the Developer: The development of Scout Tracker started as a local project to help my Troop track the boys progress as well as report to the parents their progress. We always seemed to have a disconnect with the parents on the progress of their scout. I designed the application to allow parents to see an on demand and up to date snap shot of their boys progress. It morphed into more than just a tracker. The full project has the ability to track counciler lists, merit badges, service projects, and miscellaneos items. With a little bit of programming, you can have the scouts progress emailed to the parents each week.
An end-user genealogy system like PAF, written in Java, would provide support to Mac, Linux, BSD, etc. users. With some attention to screen details it could even be run on PocketPC and Linux based PDAs. I'm not an expert Java programmer, but I could contribute code and design, but I don't have enough time available to build an entire application on my own.
Wes Peters (wes at softweyr dot com)
- I think using .NET (probably written in C#) might be better than Java. .NET programs can be run on other systems than Windows through Open Source alternatives, like Mono. Open Source alternatives to Java tend to not be as good, but Mono implements almost all of .NET. Also, I'm pretty sure .NET is on Pocket PCs, so it could run there, but I don't know of many PDAs that have a full-featured JVM. Mono could be included on Linux PDAS, although I don't think it has been so far.
Since not many of us have the time or expertise to write their own PAF replacement, what if we broke it down into meaningful components that can be integrated into any number of projects? This would reduce the barriers necessary to create meaningful products (as long as they are under the appropriate open source licensing). Once the initial algorithms are perfected, they can be ported to multiple languages (Java, .NET, PHP, etc)
For example, you could develop a GEDCOM parser that could handle multiple variations (5.5, 5.5.1, 6.0) which could be used in a desktop client or a web app. (That is a significant job in itself)
Another component might be one which goes online and grabs internet data from places such as scriptures.lds.org or rootsweb.org.
Other suggestions for reusable components? (david at idealsolutions dot org)