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Welcome to the SoftHum Education and Development Wiki

Are you an instructor thinking about teaching or already teaching a course or internship that involves students in Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software (HFOSS) projects? The purpose of this site is to provide support and guidance to instructors and others who are teaching or supporting students involved in HFOSS projects. On this site you'll find links to information on courses that have been taught at various institutions, tutorials and guidelines for OSS tools and HFOSS applications, course materials, sample student projects and other information that you may find helpful as students participate in and contribute to HFOSS projects.

The "Student Participation in the Community of Open Source Software for Humanity" (SoftHum) project is an NSF funded effort that champions the use of HFOSS as a foundation for computing education. The SoftHum project grew out of and supports the Humanitarian FOSS project. Many of the materials linked from this site were developed by the Humanitarian FOSS project, a collaborative, community-building project started by a group of computing faculty and open source proponents at Trinity College, Wesleyan University, and Connecticut College. The goal of the Humanitarian FOSS project is to build a collaborative community of educational institutions, computing organizations, and social service agencies engaged in the development of socially useful, open-source software. The SoftHum project seeks to support instructors desiring to employ HFOSS by developing a process to support student success in a community-based software experience using HFOSS, documenting an environment that supports student open source experience, and to disseminate results of projects and position additional faculty to employ HFOSS in computing education.

It is the hope of both the Humanitarian FOSS and SoftHum projects that involving students in HFOSS projects will revitalize undergraduate computing education by attracting students to the major, providing an excellent learning vehicle, and achieving social benefits.

Do you have material to contribute to support this effort? We are actively seeking additional material for this site. Please send an email to Heidi Ellis ([mailto:heidi.ells@trincoll.edu heidi.ellis@trincoll.edu]).

HFOSS Resources

 * Getting Started Using HFOSS
 * HFOSS and OSS Applications
 * Potential Student Projects
 * Other Academic Resources

 ANNOUNCEMENT: SoftHum Workshop for Educators, June 11-12, 2009 !

Deadline for applications has passed

''Acknowledgment and Disclaimer: This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Nos. CCLI-0736874, DUE-0736874,CCF-0722137, CCF-0722134, and CCF-0722199 Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. ''

''Materials on this site are freely available for academic use. In general, materials are available under the Creative Commons license, unless otherwise noted.''