About
From Humanitarian FOSS Summer Institute 2008
The Humanitarian FOSS (H-FOSS) Project offers summer internships for undergraduate computing students who want to get involved in building free and open source software for use by humanitarian organizations.
The 2008 H-FOSS Summer Institute will be held at Trinity College in Hartford, CT. The 10-week (May 27th to August 1st) Institute will engage students in a number of local and international open source projects.
The Humanitarian FOSS Project
As its name suggests, the H-FOSS project builds open source software that benefits the community, whether it be by contributing to international humanitarian FOSS efforts, such as Sahana, or by developing FOSS solutions that benefit local or regional non-profits organizations.
The primary goal of the Humanitarian FOSS Project is to build a collaborative community of educational institutions, computing organizations, and social service agencies engaged in the development of socially useful, open-source software. While humanitarian open-source software development serves as the unifying theme of the project, we believe that the primary impact on computing education will result from the successful building of this diverse community.
The problems with undergraduate computing education–sagging enrollments, out-of-date curricula, changing demographics, rapidly evolving technologies–can best be addressed by getting students excited about the technology they are learning about and getting them to see that designing and building good software is a way to contribute to society. The H-FOSS project provides challenging opportunities by which students can build their knowledge of the open source community and the contemporary software development process. Of course, study of computer science entails so much more than software development. Our hope is that by getting students interested in the kinds of contributions they can make through the H-FOSS Project, they will want to continue with the formal study of computer science and all that it entails.
For further details visit [www.hfoss.org]
