We are proud / happy / excited / thrilled / ECSTATIC to announce our four new recruits for this year’s Google Summer of Code. Four smart young coders that are going to help us on four very different projects.
(A quick note for potential and future applicants: the one thing these four have in common is that they spent the application period not trying to figure out how to make a proposal that would best fit our example projects. What they did instead was solve tickets on Github (OpenZim or Kiwix). Some of the tickets they solved were probably only mildly related to what they submitted in the end. But this let us see how they thought, coded, and interacted in a team setting. Basically they made it look like they already belonged).
Anyway, what are we (and Google) going to get at the end of the next 3-4 months?
Gouri Panda will be working on Kiwix-android, mostly trying to improve the content library (how people can choose what they want to download). This is important because there can be so much content to chose from that it actually lessens the experience;
Manan Jethwani will help us revamp entirely the way our content is displayed in the Kiwix library (and, incidentally, on our hotspot as both rely on Kiwix-serve). People visiting kiwix.org should be able to find content that is relevant, and also download the latest version available. That’s not really the case now;
Maneesh PM will work to improve Search on Kiwix (mostly libkiwix and libzim). We expect a lot from the upcoming libzim7 release. But there remains room for improvement, particularly for users searching across several zim files;
Mahak Porwal will work with an actual Googler as mentor to help us on the Wikipedia Selection tool. If you have been using Wikimed, the largest medical encyclopedia app, then you already benefited from this tool.
There were other great applicants, to be clear. But there is a constraint on how many mentors are available, and how many slots Google would assign to us. Congratulations to everyone who participated: it was hard, it can be disappointing that a project you put your heart in was not selected. But Kiwix remains an open-source project, and it is open to contributions all year round (wink, wink).