I’m pleased to announce that Google’s Summer of Code has announced which projects have been accepted. I’m pleased to let you know that our own Oliver Chalres and Lukáš Lalinský have been accepted to both work on our Next Generation Schema. Congratulations to both of you — this should be an exciting summer!
As the first act of getting ourselves organized for Summer of Code, the three of us have agreed to the following milestone schedule over the summer:
May 25: Object model and read-only user interface in place. This is essentially equivalent to Lukáš’ NGS-p implemented in Catalyst/Template Toolkit based on Oliver’s work from the last year. With this milestone users will be able to convert an existing database to the NGS schema and be able to browse the data in the new schema via the read-only user interface. No editing will be possible at this point in time.
June 29: The basic types are in place for editing artists, labels, and release-groups. Release and track level edits will not be complete.
July 27: Release and release related edit-types will be in place, but without a complete UI. The release edits will take a lot of work to get right so, we’ll have these edits in place, but may not be able to finish a working UI for them.
Aug 31: All remaining edit types are in place and the NGS enabled server enters a final beta phase.
Note that SoC doesn’t officially start until May 23 — we’re not wasting any time — in face our first milestone is due 2 days after SoC starts. Can you tell we’re serious this year?
MetaBrainz Blog 
I *like* this idea of there being read-only for a while. while we “convert” to the new database st.
e.g. easier to fix the old junk without new junk keep pouring in.