Lumen

From Berkman Klein Google Summer of Code Wiki
Jump to navigation Jump to search

https://lumendatabase.org/

Project Description

The Lumen database collects and analyzes legal complaints and requests for removal of online materials, helping Internet users to know their rights and understand the law. This data enables us to study the prevalence of legal threats and let Internet users see the source of content removals. Lumen is a Ruby on Rails web application and API running on a Postgres database. The front end uses HTML, Javascript and SCSS. Coders will have the opportunity to add features and fix bugs using test driven development with RSpec. Some of the potential projects include updating the application to the latest version of Rails, helping us find ways to more efficiently scale the amount of data we can intake, and writing adapters to help us import data from new sources. Other features may involve customizing and improving our Rails Admin interface to make administrative tasks easier for Lumen project staff.

Ideal Candidate

Lumen is interested in candidates with experience with the tools mentioned above. Most important is experience with Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, and RSpec along with git. Skills that will merit additional consideration include Javascript, HTML, SASS, FactoryGirl, and Elasticsearch. Developers of Lumen are responsible both for the implementation and design of the new features so candidates who are familiar with UI/UX conventions and making design decisions are preferred. Our ideal candidate would be comfortable taking a few sentence feature request and independently turning it into a draft feature, and then work with the project manager to iterate and improve on it. Ideal candidates should also be comfortable with identifying bug test cases and instrumenting Rails to find the source of issues along with researching potential solutions in documentation. Candidates will be have the freedom to propose and implement their own features and ideas, along with the privilege of working with experienced developers to improve their coding skills.