Here are a few project ideas I would like to work on if I only had the time. As long as I’m not able to start them, you could interpret those suggestions as lazyweb requests, so you should feel invited to execute them, but please make sure that your results are freely/libre licensed, otherwise your work would be of no help.

• A reminder web app with push notifications that works locally on the phone and only occasionally imports new events/appointments when an Internet connection is established. Many refugees fail to attend their appointments as they have difficulty to observe a weekly schedule. The web part needs to be self-hostable.
• A self-hostable messenger implemented as web app. It could also interface with e-mail and display it as if mails were normal messenger messages. Many refugees have smartphones, but without relying on telephony, Facebook or WhatsApp, it can be difficult to get in touch with them. Often they’re not used to e-mail, which is more common among German people, companies and government offices. The web app would also work on open WLAN.
• A new TODO/task manager: when a new TODO/task is added, it appears at the very top of the list, so the user can “vote” it’s priority up or down in order to make entries more or less important. If the user finds time to work on one TODO/task, he simply needs to start with the topmost one and stick to its completion. The tool should support multiple TODO/task lists, so entries can be organized in different topics/subjects.
• A “progressive web app” app store that signs/verifies the submissions, catalogues and distributes them via “add to homescreen”, URL bookmarking, full download or other techniques. The idea is to create something similar to the distro repositories known in the free/libre software world and f-droid, demanding that those apps come with their code to avoid the SaaSS loophole. Features like user reviews or obligatory/voluntary payment to the developers could be considered, as well as crawling the web to discover existing web apps.
• E-Mail to EPUB. E-Mail is .eml files in IMF format. I already have a few components and are currently trying to write a parser for IMF or find a no-/low-dependency existing one. In the future, that project could evolve into a semantic e-mail client (better than putting broken HTML into the message body) that retrieves and sends data to the server.
• In Germany, the “Störerhaftung” finally got abandoned, so Augmented Reality and the Internet of Things get a late chance here too. Before, by sharing my flatrate-paid Internet access with neighbors and passersby, law would have considered me as a contributor/facilitator if a user committed an illegal action over my wire (basically, as investigators can never find out who’s at the end of a line, they cheaply just wanted to punish whoever happened to rent/own the line at that time or demand users of the network to be identified). In cities, there are a lot of private WLAN access points connected to the Internet, and almost all of them are locked down because of the liability, leaving Germany with pretty bad connectivity. With such legal risks removed, I can assume more and more gratis Internet access outside in the public, so I would like to develop an app where people can join a group and via GPS the app would display in which direction and in what distance members of the group are located. That way, if I’m in an unfamiliar city together with friends, family or colleagues, it’s easier to not loose each other without the need of phone calls or looking at an online/offline map. Such a solution needs to be self-hostable to mitigate privacy concerns, and enabling geolocation always needs to be optional. Deniability could come from lack of connectivity or the claim of staying inside a building, or the general decision of not using the app, joining groups but not enabling geolocation, or faking the location via a modified client. The app is not trying to solve a social problem, it’s supposed to provide the capability if all members of the group agree to use it. “App” is intended for AR glasses, alternatively the smartphone/tablet, alternatively a notebook.
• Develop a library, self-hosted server, generic client and a directory of services for Augmented Reality that allows content to be delivered depending on the location of the user. That could be text (special offers by department stores or a event schedule), audio (listen to a history guide while walking through the city, maybe even offered in many languages) or just leaving notes on places for yourself or members of the family or group (which groceries to buy where), where the door key is hidden, long lists of inventory locations).
• In my browser, I have lots and lots of unstructured bookmarks. If I switch to one of my other machines, I can’t access them. It would be nice to have a synchronization feature which could be extended to check if the links are still live or dead. In case of the latter, the tool could attempt to change the bookmark to the historical version of the site as archived by the Wayback Machine of the Internet Archive, referencing the most recent snapshot relative to the time of the bookmarking, hopefully avoiding the pro-active archival of what’s being bookmarked. On the other hand, a bookmark could also be an (optional?) straight save-to-disk, while the URL + other metadata (timestamp) is maintained for future reference. The tool could do additional things like providing an auto-complete tagging mechanism, a simple comment function for describing why this bookmark was set or a “private/personal” category/flag for links which shouldn’t be exported to a public link collection.
• An XML interface for PoDoFo. PoDoFo is a new library to create PDF files with C++. With an XML interface, PoDoFo would become accessible for other programming languages and would avoid the need to hardcode PoDoFo document creation in C++, so PoDoFo could be used as another PDF generator backend in automated workflows. The XML reading could be provided by the dependency-less StAX library in C++ that was developed for this purpose.
• Subscribe to video playlists. Many video sites have the concept of a “channel”, and as they fail to provide their users a way to manage several channels at once (combining messages and analytics from different channels into a single interface), uploaders tend to organize their videos in playlists, usually by topic. As humans are pretty diverse creatures and do many different things at the same time, I might not be interested in everything a channel/uploader is promoting, I would rather subscribe to a particular playlist/topic instead to the channel as a whole. This notion of course could be generalized, why not subscribe to certain dates, locations, languages, categories, tags, whatever?
• Ad-hoc video playlists. Video sites allow their users to create playlists, but only if they have an account and are logged in. Sometimes you just want to create a playlist of videos that are not necessarily your own without being logged in, for instance to play some of your favorite music in random order. If such external playlists should not be public, access could be made more difficult by requiring a password first or by only being available under a non-guessable URL. Embedding the videos shouldn’t be too hard, but continuing with the next probably requires some JavaScript fiddling. Should support many video sites as sources via embedding.

If you’re not going to implement those ideas yourself, please at least let me know what you think of them or if you have suggestions or know software that already exists. If you want or need such tools too, you could try to motivate me to do a particular project first. Maybe we could even work together in one way or another!

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