The Humanitarian FOSS Project: Goals, Activities, and Outcomes

Begun in 2006, the Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software Project (HFOSS Project) is an educational initiative whose goal is to engage undergraduates in computer science by building free and open source software that benefits humanity, both locally and globally. During its short lifetime, the Project has inspired increasing numbers of students and instructors to make significant contributions to several humanitarian open source software development projects. In the last four years, the HFOSS Project has received material support from several partners, including the National Science Foundation, Accenture, Google, and Mozilla. This support has enabled the Project to expand its reach to add new college and university partners and to add more humanitarian software projects. Contributions to the HFOSS Project come from professionals in academia, IT organizations, and non-profit organizations that engage undergraduate students in courses, research projects, and summer internship experiences. Its curriculum is accessible to a wide range of undergraduates, since it includes courses for non- majors as well as computer science and engineering majors. This paper describes all these activities and their impact on undergraduate computing education, local non-profit organizations, and global FOSS communities. It concludes by identifying the progress that the HFOSS Project has made toward developing a sustainable infrastructure.