A less ambitious goal would be to patch some of the widely-used higher-level applications so that they would run on Plan9. E.g., if I could get a virtual Plan9 machine with Python/django, PostgreSQL, and lighthttpd, I would have a starting point where I could do something practical, and then I could explore how to use the specific features of Plan9 to make those tools more productive.

It looks like even that would be a big undertaking: http://www.mail-archive.com/plan9-gsoc@googlegroups.com/msg0...