HFOSS

Coding for good: Highlights from the open source humanitarian movement

open source lightning talks

HFOSS, Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software, is a movement inspired first by the December 2004 Asian tsunami, and then by other humanitarian needs in the health, civic, finance and academic sectors (especially for women and people of color).

Leslie Hawthorn, part of Red Hat's Community Action and Impact team, gives example after example of how HFOSS has improved and made possible disaster preparedness and relief programs, as well as empowered other projects: » Read more

0 CommentsPosted 28 Sep 2012 by Leslie Hawthorn (Red Hat)

Open source and faculty motivation

Open source and faculty motivation

When I spent some time going around North Carolina recently visiting POSSE professors, I had a realization: We encourage professors to be productively lost, to go out and feel immersed in a community, admit that they can't solve all of the problems themselves, and act more as a facilitator in the classroom. That helps them identify the right questions to ask--and the right places to ask them--online.
» Read more

0 CommentsPosted 1 Dec 2011 by Sebastian Dziallas

OVC evolution, a snapshot of a student HFOSS work-in-progress

Three Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) students recently gained recognition for a Humanitarian Free and Open Source (HFOSS) proof-of-concept project, Open Video Chat (OVC).  OVC put a functional video chat program written designed for deaf students on to the OLPC XO 1.5 computer. This is the story of how it got started and where it can go from here. » Read more

0 CommentsPosted 8 Apr 2011 by Stephen Jacobs