Another team of students developed applications to monitor rainfall and commodity food prices in Haiti during a weekend event called Random Hacks of Kindness, held at Trinity (and 14 other sites around the globe) last June. “We were able to develop a working prototype within a span of just 48 hours,” says Megan Chiu ’14. Random Hacks of Kindness is a joint effort between Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, NASA, and the World Bank that promotes the use of technology “to make the world a better place.”

Rachel Foecking ’11 participated in the HFOSS Summer Institute for all four of her Trinity years. She worked on five HFOSS projects, including the ACDI/ VOCA project and the GNOME Accessibility project, which aims to make GNOME, a desktop environment for Linux, more accessible to users with disabilities. “I think HFOSS has something great going on here,” says Foecking, who has started her “dream job” as a programmer in New York City.

By engaging students in humanitarian efforts, where they can see the benefits of their work, HFOSS hopes to get more young people like Foecking interested in computer science. “We’re trying to show students that there’s more to computer science than sitting in the back room and writing code,” says de Lanerolle.

Computing for the common good

The seeds for HFOSS were planted in 2005, when David Patterson, president of the Association for Computing Machinery, gave a call to arms to computer scientists to use their skills for the common good. He also suggested that engaging students in the free and open software movement could bolster lagging enrollment in computer science.

While de Lanerolle, then a technology coordinator in Trinity’s computer science department, and Morelli were pondering ways to incorporate Patterson’s suggestions into the Trinity curriculum, they learned of a program called Sahana. Sinhalese for relief, Sahana is a free and open-source disaster management system developed in Sri Lanka in response to the 2004 tsunami.

De Lanerolle, a native of Colombo, Sri Lanka, had returned to his hometown a year after the disaster. While there, he had the opportunity to meet the Sahana team, including project leader Chamindra de Silva. “It was a perfect fit,” says Morelli. “We wanted to build free software that served a humanitarian need, and Sahana could use our help.”

Morelli, de Lanerolle, and students Jon Damon ’07 and Bill Zeller ’06 (now deceased) teamed with IT volunteers from Accenture Corporation to build a Volunteer Management (VM) module for Sahana. “We learned about the various difficulties with managing volunteers following disasters and identified it as a weakness in Sahana at the time,” says de Lanerolle.

In June 2006, de Lanerolle, Zeller, and Damon field-tested a prototype of the VM module at the Strong Angel III Disaster Response Demonstration in San Diego. A year later, students from Trinity and Connecticut College further revised the VM module, which is part of the core Sahana platform.

“What struck us as significant about this experiment was how quickly and positively the students responded and how well they performed in the sometimes chaotic environment of a real-world open-source project,” says Morelli.

In the fall of 2006, HFOSS was started with a grant from the National Science Foundation, under its Pathways to Revitalized Undergraduate Computing Education program (CPATH). The focus of CPATH is to help revitalize interest in computing education.

Since its inception at Trinity, Wesleyan, and Connecticut College in 2007, HFOSS chapters have sprung up at Mt. Holyoke College, St. John’s University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and several more U.S. colleges. This summer an HFOSS team will return to Haiti to pilot an app that uses the phone's barcode reader to register beneficiaries. Morelli and de Lanerolle hope to engage more high-school students in HFOSS and are seeking funding to keep the project going. The bottom line, Morelli says, “is to keep engaging future computer scientists.” And change the world.

For more information visit www.hfoss.org.  

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