February 28, 2014 -- Farallon Geographics is excited to announce that it has been selected to be a mentoring organization for the Google Summer of Code for the Arches geospatial cultural heritage project ( ArchesProject.org). We are looking forward to an exciting summer with awesome contributions from students from the international community.

Google Summer of Code introduces young developers to important open source projects
Google Summer of Code is a global program that offers students stipends to come up with interesting, non-trivial problems/solutions or enhancements for some of the most important open source projects and work on them over the summer. The Arches Geospatial Asset Management Project for Cultural Heritage was selected for 2014.

Farallon mentors and subject area resources
Participants in the Google Summer of Code get support from the Arches community plus a Farallon Geographics mentor who and acts as their primary guide to help them stay on track to meet their goals. In addition to a primary mentor, students also receive help from Farallon Geographics subject-area experts including experts in front-end/JavaScript, Python, geospatial database developers, web development and Elasticsearch. Farallon CEO Dennis Wuthrich (the architect of Arches) will help students to understand the project and how their efforts can impact the wider Cultural Heritage community. This is an incredible opportunity for students to get involved with the Arches project and get technical mentoring along the way.

How to get involved
First, review the 'Ideas for Improving Arches' project ideas page. The ideas there are meant as starting points. Students are encouraged to review these ideas in much more detail and then give their suggestions and even detailed plans on how they want to proceed. Feel free to add ideas to the list in the Arches community discussion forum.

What skills are needed to work on these ideas?
As long as you're interested in cultural heritage and are not completely new to web programming, you should check out the project. You'll have a leg up if you know Python for server-side development and JavaScript plus standard CSS3/HTML5 knowledge for front-end development. Familiarity with Django and/or with Model-View-Controller (MVC) patterns is helpful, as is familiarity with JSON, which is used for data transfer between client and server.

Farallon knows that students love Open Source software, maps and flip flops. The Arches project and the Google Summer of Code could be your ticket to summer paradise.

About the Arches Project
Arches is a modern, user-friendly, open source information system created to help organizations inventory and manage heritage places of all types. It is a solution that is both applicable and relevant to a broad spectrum of heritage organizations all over the world, while also incorporating complex functions such as semantic ontology, graph database, Elasticsearch and built-in mechanisms to enforce data standards.

About Farallon Geographics
Farallon Geographics ( fargeo.com), based in San Francisco, is a leader in the planning, implementation, and integration of geospatial data and GIS systems to support mission critical business functions. As systems integrators focused on geographical data, Farallon provides unique and unbiased strategic and technical implementation services for enterprise-scale GIS.