Here's some ideas. The idea has to be substantive enough to be... well, to be sufficiently substantive. Not all of these ideas are so substantive, so a proposal might use one of these as a starting point, or might be a combination of several ideas.
Many of these refer to [http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0333.html WSGI], the Web-Server Gateway Interface. It's mostly an aspect of the implementation, many kinds of frameworks and tools could fit into that framework, and would apply to most all Python WebProgramming (see that link -- there's a lot!)
If you have questions you can contact web-sig@python.org ([http://www.python.org/sigs/web-sig/ Web-SIG]), or one of the potential advisors listed at the end of this page. (But if you aren't willing to do some homework on these projects, that obviously won't look good... ask smart questions!)
- A WSGI file-serving application. This application should understand all the relevant conditionals (If-Modified-Since, etc), gzipped encoding, etc.
- A proxy WSGI application (i.e., a WSGI application that echos another HTTP server).
A forking backend to [http://twistedmatrix.com Twisted], so that non-threadsafe/non-asynchronous applications could be run under Twisted.
- A web-based debugger. Given an exception or breakpoint, the user could inspect local variables in different frames (different levels of the stack), evaluate expressions in those frames, etc. This would be a great place to use Ajax.
- A Zope WSGI Server, making it possible to run WSGI applications under Zope.
- Fixing/improving the Python-XPCOM bindings for Mozilla (that allow you to script Mozilla in Python). The code is there, but maybe needs some loving.
- WSGI scheme for Python's urllib(2), so WSGI applications can be accessed like remote sites.
- A generic Python library for doing things with Google Maps.
- A library/framework/WSGI application for a WebDAV server.
These are more general applications:
- A system to comment on pages; specifically one that is applicable to the Python standard reference. Simple commenting (PHP.net-style) would be a start; annotation would be even better. Another Ajax opportunity; though of course the server-side implementation should be in Python.
Most of my own interests center around WSGI middleware, or [http://pythonpaste.org Paste] (which in practice is nearly the same thing). WSGI just about implementation really; nearly any kind of web programming infrastructure or application can fit into that. You can come up with something yourself or ask me; either way, I'm open to advising -- IanBicking
(other people who may be willing to advise should add a note here)