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