Operation Phoenix

Background and Motivation

Most not-for-profit open-source organizations face challenges with the long-term maintenance of their projects, especially considering that software engineering evolves rapidly. AOSSIE, as a 10-year old organization, is no exception.

Some of our projects have become inactive. This idea is to reactivate some of these inactive projects, when it is sensible to do so.

Not every inactive project needs or deserves to be reactivated. Due to our innovative nature, we try new projects and sometimes these projects fail. Sometimes, technology or society just evolve in ways that make a project or even its underlying idea hopelessly obsolete.

However, sometimes a project becomes inactive purely by accident. For instance, maybe the contributors who were pushing that project forward had personal issues that prevented them from continuing the project's maintenance. Maybe a service or tech on which the project depended became unavailable.

Sometimes a project becomes intentionally inactive, because it was deemed to be complete and stable years ago. But, as technology evolves, the project may need to evolve too. For instance, new programming languages become popular and other languages fade in popularity, and this may lead us to reimplement a library for the newer languages.

In such cases, the project or its underlying idea may continue to be relevant, even if it went through a period of inactivity or dormancy. Like the mythological Phoenix bird, these projects may deserve to be reborn.

Overview of Tasks

Identify one or more inactive projects that deserve to be reactivated and that you would like to reactivate and maintain.
Identify the reasons why these projects became inactive and what needs to be done to bring these projects back to life. Take into account both technical and social aspects.
- For instance: Does the project need to be refactored? Does the project's idea need to be re-implemented using a newer tech stack? Does the project need new features? Does the project need fewer features to address feature bloat and scope creep? And so on...
- For instance: What does the project need to motivate contrbiutors to maintain it and motivate users to use it? Does the project need to try different approaches to achieve better "product-market fit"?
Plan and execute coding tasks that will address the identified reasons for inactivity.

Candidates are expected to refine these tasks in their GSoC proposals.

Requirements

You should argue why it is relevant to reactivate a project and why executing your reactivation plan will address the root causes for inactivity.
A reactivated project should be brought to the highest current standards by AOSSIE.

Mentors

Look for mentors with the respective @Contributor-X roles in our discord servers, where X is the project that you would like to reactivate. Note that, because these projects are inactive, it may be harder to get in touch with these mentors. This is part of the challenge of this idea, and you should be comfortable working more independently and with mentors that may be less available than usual.

Communication Channel

Join our Discord servers (https://discord.gg/xnmAPS7zqB and https://discord.gg/fuuWX4AbJt) and discuss this idea in th respective project channels under https://discord.com/channels/1022871757289422898/1311271241037905950 .