I'm making a last minute entry into Google Summer of Code, and I need two mentors to sign on! So, I'm putting my proposal out there, and if any mentors are interested, please (please (please!)) let me know. You can reach me chart058@newschool.edu. Thanks!
The proposal:
Imagine a cross between Facebook and the Onion. That's what I'd like to create - a satirical social network built using Drupal. It would be a opensource platform for crowdsourced gag features. Humor is a powerful creative instinct that's rarely appealed to. This site could leverage developer humor to generate Drupal modules. As evidenced by Don Quixote and Dante's Inferno, works of satire often come to define the genre they're satirizing. So it is that the gag features may lead to real features, helping to put Drupal on the cutting edge of social network innovation.
This is an ambitious project, but fortunately I've done a lot of planning and I'd like to start small. The first steps would be to build the basic infrastructure. This involves creating a standard social network (possibly using Drupal Commons), and in addition stripping out logins and creating default user accounts so the user can jump directly into the entertainment experience.
Then, the next step would be building a few basic gag features. Examples of these would be: poke-like "shoves" that dramatically increase in frequency, with the onset of a site-wide shove war and calls to "stop the shoving!"; a feature that automatically adds cats to every profile photo; an encryption mode that automatically encrypts every post, except it turns out only the NSA has the decryption key. These are just to get the ball rolling. Gag content would also be added, mostly fake profiles (including a crazed founder, a satire of Jobs/Gates/Zuckerberg), and fake ads.
The final step would be opening the site up to others, which includes prepping it for Github, introducing it to the Drupal community, and generally showing it off proudly.