Stanford Management Science and Engineering senior student projects – working on open source with Wagtail

[thibaudcolas]

Sharing this for future reference / wider community awareness. On the Climate Action Tech Slack, someone shared Stanford’s MS&E Senior Projects page and said they were looking for project ideas. This is for teams of 3-4 senior students of Management Science and Engineering, working over 10 weeks (January - March 2024).

We discussed this with the Wagtail core team, reviewing the following project ideas:

1. Sustainability improvements roadmap
2. Accessibility: automated and manual checks that would work well across a wide range of projects and languages
3. Scaling community-driven packages maintenance
4. Scaling outreach and diversity efforts

After deliberating, we retained the sustainability and packages maintenance ideas as the strongest. Here’s a copy of our proposals proposals, which are now with the sudents’ program for consideration.

Sustainability improvements roadmap

We are currently developing a sustainability roadmap with the aim of reducing the carbon footprint of websites and the web industry at large. This project presents a unique opportunity for student teams to engage in data-driven analysis and decision-making, contributing to a significant ecological initiative in the tech industry.

Students are expected to conduct thorough research, analyze data, and devise strategies to enhance sustainability, not just for Wagtail but for the broader Django ecosystem. This initiative does not require deep knowledge of Wagtail's inner workings, making it accessible to students from various academic backgrounds.

The outcome will be a comprehensive sustainability roadmap, strategies for community engagement in ecological practices, and applicable recommendations for the wider Django community.

Scaling community-driven packages maintenance

Wagtail, an open-source community known for its content management system within the Python and Django ecosystems, is at the forefront of powering websites for organizations like NASA JPL, Google, and the UK NHS. With an estimated 5,000 to 50,000 Wagtail-powered websites globally, we face a unique challenge: managing the influx of community-created software packages that extend Wagtail's capabilities.

This project aims to develop strategies for distributing the maintenance workload of these packages, a task that presents significant organizational and cultural challenges due to the varying engagement levels of package maintainers. We seek a student team to conduct a comprehensive analysis — both quantitative and qualitative — drawing on available data and community interviews.

The goal is to propose solutions for scalable package maintenance, encourage community ownership, maintain security integrity, and possibly extend our findings to the broader community.