Development/Summer of Code/2016

Mentors

This year Robert Kaye, Michael Wiencek and Alastair Porter will probably be amongst our mentors. That's ruaok (Robert), alastairp (Alastair Porter) and bitmap (Michael) on IRC, if you want to come and speak to us first. Some potential mentors are listed by each project; this is far from a normative list, but it might give you somebody to ask about the project.

Suggestions

This is our set of starting ideas for 2016. Add more ideas if you have them!

AcousticBrainz

Proposed mentor: ruaok or alastairp
Languages/skills: Python, Postgres, Flask

AcousticBrainz is our new project that aims to crowdsource acoustic information for all music in the world and to make it available to the public. We already have low-level information about more than a million tracks. What we need is a good way for users and developers to interact with all this data and help improve algorithms that are used to analyze it.

It would suit someone with experience or an interest in machine learning algorithms, though the majority of the project will probably involve creating instructure around our existing algorithms.

Ideas for this project are described on a separate page: AcousticBrainz/Ideas.

You can read more information about AcousticBrainz and some of the existing models that we have created on our blog.

Add social features to MusicBrainz

Proposed mentor: ruaok
Languages/skills: Perl and/or Python, Postgres

We recently added event (read: concerts) support to MusicBrainz. Our main motivation was to add this feature for historical concerts, but it can also be used for future concerts. In the past the crowd-sourced concerts on last.fm were the best place to find concerts, but in the past few years last.fm has begun to fade from people's awareness. There is a possibility that MusicBrainz can take the former place of last.fm and become the best crowd source concert information site on the net. In order for this to happen, we would need to add a few more features to MusicBrainz:

• Social notifications: MB users should be able to post to Facebook/Twitter when they do plan to attend a concert.
• Other features: What features should we add to build a community around concert information curation?

These social features are important for building a community of users around concerts. The goal is to engage users to enter information about concerts and venues and then talk about upcoming concerts. The more people use MusicBrainz to talk about concerts publicly, more people will get drawn in to improve the concert listings in MusicBrainz.

About proposals

Before you dive in and send a proposal to us through Google, it's a good idea to take some time and learn about the MusicBrainz community. At MusicBrainz we pride ourselves for having a strong community - most of us know each other in some way, and some of us know each other face to face from development summits.

A good way to get a feel of this would be to talk about your ideas and proposals on IRC. However, starting off by sending private messages to potential mentors is not a good way to introduce yourself to the community. Please don't do that!

If you're not sure where to start, Development/Summer of Code/Getting started might help.