[xwiki-devs] New product proposal and request for volunteers

Hi everybody, On the mailing lists, we noticed several people trying to use XWiki in academic environments, requesting features such as support for mathematical equations or support for LaTeX. We took some time to design a product that would be great for writing scientific papers, identifying some important features, and some "would be nice to have" features. You can see the current design proposal at http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Design/SPAWN (feel free to send comment on the mailing list). Given the fact that this is not a product which can easily be sold, and that there are other more critical projects to work on for the moment, the core XWiki developers cannot dedicate much time on it. This is why we need help from the community. Whoever would like to use this product, and has the power and knowledge to work on in, please help us. If you are in an university as a student, you can propose one of the sub-applications as a project for one of your classes. If you are a teacher, you can propose some sub-applications as student projects. We can help with coordination, more detailed description/requirements, question answering, code review, etc. Some of the features require mostly programming skills, while others require more advanced research skills, like the positioned comments in a dynamic text (adapting some sequence alignment algorithms from bioinformatics seems the best idea for the moment, but also some fuzzy systems theory could be applied), or an automatic merge algorithm based on Operational Transformations, so some publications can come out of this, too. If we gather a few volunteers, I'll make the necessary Jira setup and mark the product as active. Regards, The XWiki dev team