Open source and education
Posted by ram in Computing Education, FOSS on April 9, 2010
Stormy Peters, executive directory of the GNOME project, has a regular column in the Open Source Business Review (OSBR) and invited me to submit a column on HFOSS and other efforts to introduce FOSS into higher education. The column is available here in the April 2010 edition.
America’s broadband problem: we need a commons
Yochai Benkler has an interesting op-ed piece in the NY Times on the recent FCC plan to widen U.S. Internet access. As Benkler describes it
The Federal Communications Commission’s National Broadband Plan, announced last week, is aimed at providing nearly universal, affordable broadband service by 2020. And while it takes many admirable steps — including very important efforts toward opening space in the broadcast spectrum — it does not address the source of the access problem: without a major policy shift to increase competition, broadband service in the United States will continue to lag far behind the rest of the developed world.
According to Benkler, for $33 per month a month a French consumer can get: high speed Internet service (twice as fast as ours) plus digital high-definition television plus unlimited long distance and international calling plus wireless Internet connectivity for your laptop or smartphone. Not bad. What does $33 get you here in the U.S.? It doesn’t even cover the mediocre Internet service we get.
QA Team for Sahana-Haiti
Posted by ram in FOSS, Humanitarian on January 27, 2010
Chamindra has organized a Quality Assurance team of volunteers to help with the testing of the Sahana-PY, the Python version of Sahana. He’s posted a helpful overview of the bug-tracking process that pulls together all the information needed to get started. Here’s another view with a nice block diagram showing the flow of Sahana’s bug tracking process.
I’ve put together a summary page for students in our CPSC 110 class, who will participating in the testing activity as a class project.
Sahana in Haiti
Posted by ram in FOSS, Humanitarian on January 24, 2010
The Sahana community has been furiously active in response to the devastating earthquake in Haiti. Their Haiti WIKI describes their activities and provides a summary of volunteer help that is needed. You can follow their activities online on the freenode #sahana IRC (Internet Relay Chat) channel, which is accessible through the web on http://www.sahana.lk/chat.
Sahana is deploying both a PHP/MySQL version of their system (the one which includes the VM module developed by students in the HFOSS project) and a newer Python version. They have called for volunteers to help with all aspects of the project, from coding to testing to data entry. Details on the data entry and bug tracking work can be found here.
Collabbit used by NYC Salvation Army to help serve 10,000 Thanksgiving dinners
Posted by trishan in Development, FOSS, Humanitarian, Information Technology, Mobile Technology, nptech on November 30, 2009
On Thanksgiving day Eli and I were in New York city to observe the Salvation Army’s Thanksgiving Day Dinner program, feeding more than 10,000 New Yorkers across the boroughs, Long Island, and Westchester – up from 800 meals in 2008 and one of the largest Thanksgiving Dinners in the Division’s 129-year history. (http://standtogethernewyork.org/10000-new-yorkers-join-us-for-thanksgiving-day-meal )
The Salvation Army Emergency Disaster Services team coordinated the one-day event in a style similar to an emergency mass feeding. A work force of 500 volunteers and employees served food across the various sites. The Emergency disaster services team used an instance of Collabbit (http://collabbit.hfoss.org) to plan and track the event as it happened.
Zach posting an update at Harlem site
Software Freedom Week at Trinity
The HFOSS Project capped off its Software Freedom Week activities with a public lecture on Free Your Mind: Social Change Begins with Software by Leslie Hawthorn, program manager for Google’s Open Source Programs Office, where she’s the community manager for the Google Summer-of-Code Program. The lecture was funded by the Mellon-funded CTW computer science project and cosponsored by the Hartford Community IT Project and the TrinFo Cafe.
Photos from Leslie’s talk and other SFW activities are available on the HFOSS flickr site. A link to a video of the talk will be posted here as soon as it is available.
Software Freedom Week was the brainchild of Prasanna Gautam (Trinity ‘11) who, together with Chris Fei (Trinity ‘10), planned and organized many of the activities. The occasion was the 25th anniversary of the founding of the free software movement by Richard Stallman. September 19th this year was Software Freedom Day, a global effort to promote the use of free and open source software (FOSS). Many groups around the world participated in the outreach effort.
Random Hacks of Kindness
Posted by trishan in Beyond CS, FOSS, Humanitarian, Information Technology, nptech on November 16, 2009
On Friday November 13th Chris and I attended the first “Random Hacks of Kindness” (RHoK) codejam at the Hacker Dojo in Mountain View California, jointly organized by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Worldbank and NASA.
RHoK is an initiative that brings together disaster relief experts and software engineers to work on identifying key challenges to disaster relief, and developing solutions to these critical issues. This Codejam is the first of a series of RHoK events that will bring developers and domain experts together for a “give camp” to solve real world-problems related to Crisis/Disaster Relief.
The views and opinions expressed in this blog are those of the individual author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Humanitarian FOSS Project or its affiliates.
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@hfoss
- Watch live coverage of the #HFOSS presentations at ISCRAM streaming live! at http://www.iscram.org/live/ #Yellowstone #Sequoia
- Trishan is presenting " Development of a virtual dashboard for event coordination between multiple groups " at #ISCRAM2010 (Paper 262).
- Ralph Morelli presenting " Wireless Ad Hoc Dissemination for Search and Rescue" at #ISCRAM2010 (Paper 214) in the morning.
- That's a wrap! Stay in touch, folks :) #HFOSS
- Abelson's #HFOSS needs social networking for the chapters, for the projects, for the people, for us