fied and worked with communities
and projects (described in the sidebar)
that are accessible and welcoming.
Sahana, OpenMRS, and InSTEDD are
appreciative of student contributions
and accepting of the compromises
imposed by academic calendars and
curricula. This summer we are working with the GNOME project on user-accessibility problems (http://proj-
ects.gnome.org/accessibility/). And a
group of HFOSS students from several
schools are currently working on the
Portable Open Search and Identification Tool (POSIT), a disaster-management tool for the Google Android
phone ( http://code.google.com/p/
posit-android/). All are ongoing projects that welcome contributions from
faculty and students at other schools.
Cultural, institutional, curricular
buy-in. Creating a new course or revising an existing one requires department support and approval. So the
computer science academic community needs a more widespread and
systematic discussion of how HFOSS
might fit into the curriculum. Similarly, faculty development itself is
not possible unless faculty and their
departments recognize such engagement as an important form of community outreach and are therefore
willing to invest the time and accept
the complexity it requires. This may
represent something of a cultural
shift for some faculty.
Helping address these challenges,
the HFOSS Project organized the first
of what are planned to be an annual
symposium on “Integrating FOSS
into the Undergraduate Computing Curriculum” (http://www.hfoss.
org/symposium09/). The March 2009
symposium’s main goal was to bring
together representatives from academia, industry, and the FOSS community to explore ways of integrating
HFOSS into undergraduate teaching.
The lively discussion that took place
in Chattanooga, TN, helped identify
a number of issues that stand in the
way of more widespread adoption of
the HFOSS model. For example, faculty participants identified a number
of activities that could help them get
involved, including summer training
workshops and support for hosting
open source code repositories.
Discussion focused on the kinds of
students see
that challenging
problems rarely
yield to “textbook”
solutions and that
the design process
is often a protracted
interaction between
programmers
and end users.
support faculty and students would
need to get started. One of the most
promising ideas now being explored is
establishment of a number of “HFOSS
Chapters” whereby a faculty member and some students could take on
a FOSS project (summer 2010). The
software industry and FOSS-community representatives at the symposium
expressed their eagerness to support
the effort, including by helping train
faculty to use FOSS tools and by providing “on ramps” to help faculty and
students be integrated into the FOSS
community.
To date, 15 additional schools
have expressed interest in becoming
HFOSS Chapters. Similarly, several
more industry and FOSS-community
supporters have volunteered to serve
on the HFOSS Project steering committee and advisory board, including representatives from the GNOME
project, Google, the Mozilla Foundation, RedHat, and Sun Microsystems.
Sustainability. No project can succeed in the long term without first
encouraging the wide adoption of its
methodologies and goals. But what
would a sustainable model look like?
In order to broadly influence undergraduate computing, high school and
college students must be able to learn
about FOSS and its humanitarian applications, thus requiring some kind
of national organization and infrastructure to manage three functions:
Funding internships (summer ˲
and, perhaps, academic year, too) to
support student involvement in specific HFOSS projects;
Funding a campaign to advertise ˲
HFOSS to prospective students, much
as Teach for America and Habitat for
Humanity advertise themselves; and
Creating and managing an in- ˲
frastructure whereby students are
matched with specific HFOSS communities (such as Sahana and OpenMRS). The Google Summer of Code
project, in which FOSS projects apply to Google for student-internship
support, could serve as an adaptable
model ( http://code.google.com/soc/).
The hope is that the computing
industry and FOSS communities embrace the potential value of HFOSS for
computing students. In addition to
revitalizing undergraduate computing education, a strong and diverse