The Humanitarian FOSS Project

Project Motivation

 * Lets help our neighbors! (David Patterson, Nov. 2005, post-Katrina)
 * Join the open source movement! (David Patterson, Mar. 2006)

Project Goals: Can these motivations be channeled to

 * Help revitalize undergraduate computing education.
 * Build free open source software (FOSS) that serves the community.

Main Pedagogical Activities

 * Regular credit courses: Intro and advanced level.
 * Independent studies: Individual students and/or small groups.
 * Summer internship program (10 interns for summer 2008).

Main Financial Support

 * A collaborative, community building (CB) grant from the NSF CPATH Program.
 * SoftHum: Grant from NSF CCLI Program
 * A collaborative Mellon Foundation Grant.

Why the Open Source Model?

 * Development Process: Transparent, based on merit and peer review.
 * Licenses: Free as in speech, not (necessarily) as in beer.
 * Distribution model: No restriction on derived works.
 * Pedagogical Virtues: Creativity, self-initiative, cooperation.

Current Development Projects (hfoss.org)

 * International Projects
 * Sahana (Sri Lanka) -- Disaster Recovery IT System
 * OpenMRS (Rwanda) -- Open Medical Record System
 * Neighborhood and Community Projects
 * VMOSS (Hartford, CT) -- Portable Volunteer Management System
 * Literacy Volunteers of Greater Hartford (Hartford, CT) -- Application Tracking System (University of Hartford)
 * The Ronald McDonald House (Brunswick ME) -- Volunteer Management and Scheduling System (Bowdoin College)
 * Independent Student Projects
 * The Touchscreen Toolkit (Giovanni Capalbo, Trinity College)
 * The CAPTCHA Verification Plugin (Turner Hayes, Wesleyan University)
 * Darien CT EMS Scheduling Calendar (Stephen Bloom and Stephen Kates, Trinity College)
 * The H-FOSS Directory (Ernel Wint and Alex Marcus, Connecticut College)