Google

The Google Open Source website was created to educate the public on Google’s efforts to contribute, host, and inspire global open source projects while encouraging the community to collaborate and develop solutions that best serve the greater community.

The goal of this project was to help Google raise awareness of the thousands of open source projects currently in development and being used under various open source licenses. The website houses projects, documentation, a blog, community building, and affiliations.

Using the Grow static site generator, our team developed this project with HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript (in ES6 or ECMAScript 6), and flat files (YAML files used to inject data into the build). The hero animation (viewed on the desktop landing page) uses CSS3 transitions while further down the page we implemented Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) animations. For the projects page, we chose to use a canvas animation to exhibit the plethora of project logos or trademarks in a radial line segment presentation. Our team collaborated with Google’s Open Source team to develop an API that allowed for developers to search through all the projects and associated metadata. Once there, users could obtain key project details including collaborators, events, tasks, goals, and a link to the repository whereby they could begin contributing. Having this central hub for developers and project stakeholders to unite helped grow projects that otherwise might have not gotten discovered.

Future improvements may look to expand the capabilities, possibly hosting live events or provide live whiteboards.

Ultimately, its features will continue to evolve to meet the community’s needs.