defined and implemented a new systemwide data structure that allows physicians to input numeric observations as ranges ( 1–5), inequalities (< 100), ratios (2: 5), and qualitative values (too few to count).

During spring 2009, a software-development course based on openmRs was offered (via videoconference) to students at connecticut college, trinity college, and Wesleyan University. Focusing on how software-engineering techniques play out in an Foss setting, it required students to put theory into practice by contributing to openmRs.

Innovative Support To Emergencies, Diseases and Disasters (InS TEDD). this lab is devoted to developing software for early disease detection and disaster response (http:// www.instedd.org). Founded in 2006 by larry Brilliant of the Google Foundation, it is funded in part by Google and the Rockefeller Foundation ( http://www.rockfound.org) and aims to integrate, tag, classify, and visualize data from various sources (such as news, weather reports, sensor data, and field reports) with the goal of detecting and managing disease outbreaks. like sahana and openmRs, insteDD is an international effort.

two students in the summer 2008 HFoss institute collaborated with researchers in seattle and Buenos Aires to develop and test data mining algorithms for the evolve project. After studying support-vector machines and Bayesian networks and mastering software tools (such as eclipse and liBsVm, http:// www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~cjlin/libsvm/), they developed the Alpaca light parsing and classifying Application (AlpAcA), a parsing and classification tool for categorizing documents into user-provided classes (http://2008.hfoss. org/AlpAcA). AlpAcA allows evolve developers and others to test classification technologies across a number of data sets. two other students are following up on this work as part of the 2009 HFoss summer institute.

Ronald McDonald House Homebase. this project involves a Web-based volunteer-man-agement-and-scheduling system used at the

figure 2. screenshot of the chinese-language version of the volunteer-management module ( http://blog.hfoss.org/?p=28).

Ronald mcDonald House in portland, me

( http://www.rmhportland.org). Developed in
spring 2008, it addresses the need for soft-
ware to replace the portland Ronald mcDon-
ald House’s error-prone, time-consuming
manual rolodex and calendar-scheduling
process. the development team included
four Bowdoin college students, one profes-
sor, Bowdoin it staff, and several Ronald
mcDonald House employees and volunteers
who would eventually use the system. the de-
velopment took place almost entirely within
a software-development course (http://hfoss.
bowdoin.edu) using a distributed-develop-
ment process and the same Foss tools used
in the global projects. 10
the four students earned independent-
study credit in computer science, as well as
a valuable learning experience. the portland
Ronald mcDonald House gained a valu-
able piece of software that arguably would
never have been developed outside the Foss
framework. the software is published on
sourceforge ( http://www.sf.net/projects/rmh-
homebase) under a GnU Gpl and is available
to other volunteer organizations.
one difference between this project and
the three international projects is the soft-
ware was designed and built from scratch,
though it followed careful study of the sahana
system. Also, unlike the international proj-
ects, it involved close interaction with end
users throughout the development process.
it also provides a potential basis for groups
of students and faculty at other colleges and
universities to join in by, say, customizing
and adapting the system for other Ronald
mcDonald Houses or other local nonprofit
organizations.
App Trac. literacy Volunteers of Greater
Hartford provides literacy training to adults,
mostly through specialized software ap-
plications in its Hartford, ct, computer lab.
the staff manually tracks student logins,
the applications the students use, and other
information it then painstakingly compiles
into reports to the organization’s board and
funding agencies.
in spring 2008, students from the Univer-
sity of Hartford developed requirements and
built a prototype application-tracking system
(Apptrac) as part of an upper-level software-
engineering course. During the 2008 HFoss
summer institute a four-student team from
three colleges—connecticut college, trinity
college, and the University of Hartford—
developed the prototype into a kiosk-based
system ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/
apptrac/). in fall 2008, working through
virtual meetings, code-sharing repositories,
and wikis, the same students modified the
system for eventual release as a generic kiosk
system for similar applications.

Unfortunately, due to the loss of its technical staff position, the literacy Volunteers of Greater Hartford ultimately decided not to deploy Apptrac in its lab. However, the software is being modified by students in the 2009 HFoss summer institute

( http://2009.hfoss.org) for deployment in the Hartford public library’s computer lab, another example of how software sharing benefits both the community and the educational process.

To explore this concept further, in spring 2008 a “general education” course called “Open Source Software for Humanity,” was taught (via videoconference) at Trinity College and Wesleyan University. 4 Its “hook” was getting students to reflect on their own experience with FOSS products (such as Wikipedia and the Firefox browser). Not surprisingly, the students were receptive to the ideals of sharing, community, and the public good. They were also enthusiastic about discussing their experience with Wikipedia, blogging, open source politics, and other aspects of the free and open culture they had grown up with. As suggested by Benkler and Nissenbaum, 1 they see the distributed FOSS model as an alternative means of producing culturally useful goods (Wikipedia) and services (SETI@home). Similarly, students generally see elements of the FOSS ethic in their own experience with file sharing. They recognize that this is a time of change in public thinking about intellectual property and the common good.

But despite their everyday use and enjoyment of FOSS products and their widespread acceptance of the freedom and openness characterizing the FOSS model, few students recognize the connections between the FOSS movement and the overall computing discipline. As one said, “Wow, I really got to look at how computer science can relate to humanitarian efforts. I now really understand [FOSS] and know why it came about.”

As a methodology, the FOSS development model represents a revolutionary break from traditional software development. 7 However, despite its commercial success, relatively little effort has gone toward incorporating the FOSS development model into undergraduate computing curricula. Our effort to see how others have incorporated FOSS into their curricula revealed only a handful of reports (reviewed by Ellis et al. 3). Our experiments with introductory and advanced courses, independent studies, and summer internships have shown that FOSS software and tools, including Apache, PHP, MySQL, Eclipse, PhpMyAdmin, and SVN, are quite accessible to today’s undergraduates.