[wp-hackers] [GSoC] Ideas and Scope Questions

[Fa -]

Dear WP Community,

I'm a final year Computer Science student, and very very interested in
joining GSoC 2008 to work for Wordpress. Actually, I have submitted my
application under this account.

However, the project I'm proposing is out of the ideas list, hence I would
really appreciate it if you don't mind to guide me here :)

This idea has actually been around for some time in my mind, as I've been
developing several Wordpress sites and been looking for these
functionalities, however I haven't been able to find them anywhere..

So this would be a plugin to boost user-interactivity of a Wordpress blog.
The fact is, blogging now isn't only a matter of speaking one's mind up.
Many that started from personal blogs have grown into huge, vibrant
communities with loyal, regular visitors. Part of this phenomenon should be
attributed to the easy to use, easy to maintain properties of Wordpress.

The objective of what is proposed here is enabling a blog to be even more
interactive, visitor-oriented, attractive to their visitors
...all achieved under the very warmth of WordPress platform.

This will be accomplished by two major functionalities: enabling
user-generated content submission via site's front end and user point /
reward scheme that promotes user's engagement.

I found some people have requested this on the WP Ideas page, and there was
also one guy who experimented by hacking comment core here:
cantwaitforchristmas.com for the sake of this function, so hopefully many
people would be happy with the presence of something like this.

I was planning to make these one integrated plugin, however it came to me
that maybe it's better to separate them and into 2 projects, so that each
can have more in-depth functionalities?

I would like to ask your opinion on the scope.. would 2 systems under one
roof be too much?
And if it's better to turn it into 2 plugins, may I know which one would you
think would be more beneficial for the community?

Thank you very much,
I'm really hoping to hearing from you all! :)