Communications - August 2009

undergraduate computing education.

The Project has been supported since September 2007 by a National Science Foundation CPATHa grant, aiming in part to build a collaborative community of individuals from multiple educational institutions, computing and IT organizations, and nonprofit social-service agencies to support undergraduates in the development of socially useful FOSS. In general, the Project aims to answer whether getting students involved in humanitarian FOSS indeed also helps revitalize undergraduate computing education.

Inspiration came from the Sahana project, a FOSS disaster-management system developed by a group of Sri Lankan volunteers in the aftermath of the December 2004 Asian tsunami. The Project began working with Sahana in January 2006 after the author Trishan de Lanerolle learned about it during a visit to Colombo, Sri Lanka (see the sidebar “Five HFOSS Software Projects”). That spring, two Trinity College students installed Sahana on an Apache server and began exploring its LAMP architecture (Linux/Apache/ MySQL/PHP) as part of their indepen-dent-study course. They worked with the code and seemed to enjoy the opportunity and challenge of being engaged in a real-world software project (as opposed to a class exercise). That summer, with support for a research student and in collaboration with community-minded volunteers from Accenture Corporation (http://accen- ture.com), it developed a volunteer-management module that was eventually accepted into Sahana’s code base. Thus began an ongoing collaboration with the Sahana community.

The initial experience with Sahana dovetailed with two ideas outlined by former ACM president David Patterson in his “President’s Letter” columns in Communications. In “ Rescuing Our Families, Our Neighbors, and Ourselves” (November 2005), he suggested it might be the civic duty of computing professionals to be more

a CPATH is a National Science Foundation program within the Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering, formally known as CISE Pathways to Revitalize Undergraduate Computing Education (http://www. nsf.gov/cise/funding/cpath_faq.jsp).

involved in helping their communities recover from natural disasters while simultaneously helping the profession. 5 In “Computer Science Education in the 21st Century” (March 2006), he explored the disconnect between how programming is taught in the classroom and how cutting-edge software is written in industry, urging educators to involve themselves in the open source movement. 6

The call to build open source software to help our neighbors resonated with the Sahana experience, suggesting that a project organized around this theme might yield beneficial outcomes for undergraduate computing:

Give computing students experi- ˲ ence with the open source development process in a real-world practitioner environment;

Let them see firsthand the impor- ˲ tance of software-engineering principles;

Enable them to use their pro- ˲ gramming and problem-solving skills to contribute to the expanding volun-teerism movement that characterizes many of today’s college campuses;

Make it possible for them to gain ˲ firsthand contact with IT professionals in the computing industry;

Enable computing faculty to ex- ˲ periment with a variety of approaches for incorporating FOSS into the curriculum; and

Invite all participants—faculty, ˲ students, IT professionals, and the humanitarian community—to join in a mutually beneficial educational and social enterprise.

Problems that beset undergraduate computing education in the U.S. include sagging enrollment, out-of-date curricula, changing demographics, and rapidly evolving technologies. While they are most closely associated with the academic computing discipline, they are also associated with a number of myths and misconceptions that extend well beyond the academy to society in general: computer science is nothing but coding; computing students are geeks; programming is an isolating activity; and computing jobs are being outsourced to Asia and Eastern Europe.

These problems and myths cannot be addressed within the academy alone. Rather, what’s needed is

a sustained effort involving a broad coalition of computing educators and industry professionals. Only such an effort can change false perceptions about computing in the larger society. The effort also requires substantial support from the computing industry, which stands to benefit from a revitalized computing curriculum. It also may require the kind of infrastructure and publicity one finds in other communities (such as Teach for America and Habitat for Humanity) that attempt to mobilize students and others to take on real-world projects for the social good.

serve society

While FOSS applications run the gamut of computer software, HFOSS, as we define it, is software that serves society in some direct way. This deliberately broad definition is meant to be inclusive of a wide range of socially beneficial projects and activities.b To date, the HFOSS Project has not had to face the question of where to draw the line between humanitarian and non-humanitarian FOSS. As a practical measure we use the guideline that any software artifact the Project creates must intrinsically benefit a nonprofit organization pursuing some kind of public-service mission.

As described by Chopra and Dexter2 the free-software movement has roots going back 60 years to the beginning of the computer age when sharing programming ideas and code was the norm. The modern free-software movement began in 1983 when Richard Stallman defined “free software” as the freedom to use, study, copy, change, and redistribute software “so that the whole community benefits” ( http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free- sw.html).

Following the spectacular success of the GNU/Linux project (http://www. gnu.org/), the free-software movement has grown in scope and importance. An April 2008 study by the Standish Group ( http://www.standish- group.com/) estimated that open source software costs the software industry $60 billion in potential annual revenue. 9 SourceForge (http://source-