HFOSS Projects
This page contains lists of HFOSS and FOSS applications that could possibly serve as student projects. The projects are at various levels of maturity and have a range of complexity. This list could serve as an initial starting point in identifying possible HFOSS and FOSS communities with which to work.
In addition to applications lists, there are sections containing resources that will help you find other projects and resources for FOSS developers to help you get started. There are also external links to other helpful FOSS related resources.
Contents |
HFOSS Projects by Application Area
Accessibility
Amara - Amara gives individuals, communities, and larger organizations the power to overcome accessibility and language barriers for online video. The tools are free and open source and make the work of subtitling and translating video simpler, more appealing, and, most of all, more collaborative.
GNOME - Accessibility project Develops and fosters compelling free open source accessibility solutions for graphical user interfaces. Through a worldwide community of developers and users, we continue to empower everyone, regardless of physical or mental abilities. (TOS recommended)
GNOME - Empathy - Messaging program which supports text, voice, and video chat and file transfers over many different protocols. You can tell it about your accounts on all those services and do all your chatting within one application.
The Global Ability Initiative (AKA The Project Group X-Tra?) is a venture dedicated to the development of gratis, open source software for the disabled. We provide assistive software for a wide variety of people, suffering for example from Aphasia, MS, ALS, Cerebral Palsy and other disabilities as well.
Poet Image Description - An application to increase the availability of image descriptions in textbooks for print disabled students. This image description web service will enable authors/content creators, publishers, social enterprises, such as Bookshare, educators and volunteers to easily add, enhance, moderate and share image descriptions to e-books and digital textbooks in the DAISY 3, EPUB and HTML standards.
Project Possibility - Nonprofit, community service project committed to creating groundbreaking software for the disabled community--for free. Our goal is to inspire software engineers to make a difference by inventing software that unlocks new areas of life for disabled persons, giving them access to experiences previously impossible to achieve. The software that is created through this project is open source: it cannot be sold for profit, and is freely available for use, distribution, and modification.
Wheelmap - Wheelmap.org is an online map to search, find and mark wheelchair-accessible places. Wheelmap is built on Open Street Map.
Disaster management and humanitarian relief
(HELP) Humanitarian Emergency Lifeline Project aims to overcome challenges facing humanitarian relief by empowering donors, communities and organizations to provide better assistance. HELP will establish a transparent and accountable system to connect donors with people affected by disasters.
Helios A web-based comprehensive supply chain solution for the humanitarian and disaster relief sector which aims to provides better access to supply chain information to enhance decision-making at every level throughout the aid delivery process.
Ecology
Miradi A program that allows nature conservation practitioners to design, manage, monitor, and learn from their projects to more effectively meet their conservation goals. The program guides users through a series of step-by-step interview wizards, based on the Open Standards for the Practice of Conservation.
mWater Free Android app for low cost community based water quality monitoring. The site describes the app as "open source", but it's not clear whether additional project participants are wanted. Other FOSS project characteristics (source code, licensing, open project operations, etc.) are not visible.
Education
One laptop per child (OLPC) - Mission Statement: To create educational opportunities for the world's poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning.
Sugar Labs Spin-off from OLPC (one laptop per child) that is doing software to create a learning environment for children. The award-winning Sugar Learning Platform promotes collaborative learning through Sugar Activities that encourage critical thinking, the heart of a quality education. Designed from the ground up especially for children, Sugar offers an alternative to traditional “office-desktop” software.
OO4Kids (pronounced "OpenOffice for Kids") is a software (work in progress) designed for 7-12 children, based on OpenOffice.org source code, but simplified. This means OpenOffice.org has some features OOo4Kids has not. And if you need those features, please use OpenOffice.org, that you can download at: http://download.openoffice.org/index.html
OpenOffice.org Education project
Kuali.org Growing community of universities, colleges, businesses, and other organizations that have partnered to build and sustain open-source administrative software for higher education, by higher education. Kuali software is designed to meet the needs of all sizes of institutions, from land-grant reasearch universities to community colleges. The members of the Kuali Community share a common vision of open, modular, and distributed systems for their software requirements. Kuali software is released under the Educational Community License.
Sakai.org The Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment is developed by a community that strives to enable exceptional teaching, learning and research. Sakai collaborators - ranging from educators to engineers - share in their successes and challenges, honing the community's collective expertise to drive rapid development of this enterprise-ready platform.
Instructure Canvas Canvas is a learning management system distributed as a FOSS product by Instructure. Instructure is a relatively new company with venture capital backing. Canvas is distributed as FOSS and offered as a service for a fee.
Celestia "The free space simulation that lets you explore our universe in three dimensions."
openStudent A student information system for British Columbia Schools.
Shared Learning Collaborative "The SLC is working to make personalized learning a reality for every U.S. student by improving the usefulness, variety and affordability of education technology."
Food Bank/Pantry
OpenArms is an open-source software project that aims to help food banks match up donors with those in need. Organizers can use the software to create templates for hampers. Groups or individuals can choose to sponsor a family and then use the web site to manage the donations.
Open Pantry is an Interactive Qualifying Project by two Worcester Polytechnic Institute students. This software aims to provide an efficient way to manage and organize clients, inventory, distribution and reporting for volunteers and employees at TEFAP and MEFAP funded food pantries. The solution is specifically aimed toward the needs of the Burlington Food Pantry, however it is designed in such a way that it should be reusable by other similar organizations.
Food Bank Markup Language FBML (Food Bank Markup Language) is written using XML, and will have an application written in Python to enable the use of FBML in the background; and will be OS agnostic. (NOTE: as of 11/2011 this appears to be a project that was created but never realized)
Healthcare
OpenEHR An international not-for-profit Foundation, working towards:
* Making the interoperable, life-long electronic health record a reality * Improving health care in the information society.
Multi-Level Healthcare Information Modeling Evolved out of OpenEHR, this is a group of frameworks, applications and tools used in developing health care applications and the governance of knowledge artifacts using multi-level information models vs. data model approaches. Based on more than 20 years of research and development projects on three continents. These specifications came together in the early 2000's under the auspices of the openEHR Foundation.
Open Source Health Information Platform (OSHIP) Implementation of Multi-Level Healthcare Information Modeling. An application development platform (most mature version is Python) based on MLHIM.
TORCH Project under Multi-Level Healthcare Information Modeling, Trusted Open Source Records for Care and Health - TORCH is a web enabled electronic health record (EHR) application. TORCH is usable in single practitioner offices and scalable up to multi-site practices.
OpenHealth Platform that brings together interoperable public health applications targeting district, national and global health management. The Public Health Information Toolkit (PHIT) is meant to be a self-contained USB pendrive that makes public health tools and frameworks available “out of the box”, including content developed by leading public health organizations and networked communities of practice. The starter suite of tools brings together OpenMRS, iHRIS, DHIS2 and OpenHealthMapper (OHM)
OpenHealthMapper Project under Open Health, OpenHealthMapper is a user-friendly data management and mapping system customized specifically for public health users. The system facilitates data standardization, collection and updating of data on epidemiology and on interventions and provides immediate visualization of data in the form of maps, tables and charts.
DIHS2 Project under Open Health, DHIS2 is a tool for collection, validation, analysis, and presentation of aggregate statistical data, tailored (but not limited) to integrated health information management activities. It is a generic tool rather than a pre-configured database application, with an open meta-data model and a flexible user interface that allows the user to design the contents of a specific information system without the need for programming. DHIS 2 and upwards is a modular web-based software package built with free and open source Java frameworks.
Tolven Health Record Tolven is focused on delivering the following products: An electronic Personal Health Record (ePHR) to enable consumers to record and selectively share healthcare information about themselves and their loved ones. An electronic Clinician Health Record (eCHR) to enable healthcare providers to securely access healthcare information collated from any number of trusted sources. A Healthcare Informatics Platform to enable all healthcare data to be stored and accessed via the ePHR and eCHR solutions. The platform is based on industry-standard technologies and data models. A Health Analytics solution that enables all data stored in the Tolven Platformto be extracted or analyzed for statistical purposes.
VistA WorldVistA EHR is an open source electronic health record (EHR) based on the highly acclaimed VistA system of the United States Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). The foundation for WorldVistA EHR was developed as part of the VistA-Office project, a collaborative effort funded by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), an agency of the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). The overall goal of the VistA-Office EHR (VOE) project was to encourage the broader adoption and effective use of EHRs among physicians by making a robust, flexible EHR solution alternative available. After completion of the VOE project in March 2007, WorldVistA made additional enhancements and submitted WorldVistA EHR for certification by theCertification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology(CCHITSM). WorldVistA EHR, Verison VOE/1.0 achieved full CCHITSM EHR.
X-Chart X-Chart is an XML-based open source health record. Since it uses an open source code, it is distributed free of charge by the Open Healthcare Group.
STEM Epidemiological Modeler (STEM) tool is designed to help scientists and public health officials create and use spatial and temporal models of emerging infectious diseases. These models can aid in understanding and potentially preventing the spread of such diseases. HE: Appears to be on version 0.6.
Global Health Observatory The Global Health Observatory project aims to make statistical data that has been collected and processed by the World Health Organization available to the general public. This is the GHO application set intended for installation on the WHO production tomcat hosting servers.
OpenVista OpenVista<tm> is a cost-effective, open, trusted and complete EHR which enhances patient safety, increases clinical and operational efficiency and provides an opportunity to improve quality of care delivery. See the related/sub projects listed below.
HRIS The Capacity Project has developed three free and Open Source core software solutions, each addressing a specific human resources for health (HRH) leadership issue:
* iHRIS Qualify is a training and licensure tracking database. * iHRIS Manage is a human resources management system. * iHRIS Plan is workforce planning and modeling software.
OpenEPI Provides statistics for counts and measurements in descriptive and analytic studies, stratified analysis with exact confidence limits, matched pair and person-time analysis, sample size and power calculations, random numbers, sensitivity, specificity and other evaluation statistics, R x C tables, chi-square for dose-response, and links to other useful sites. HE: This project is under development at Emory University and was originally funded with a grant from Bill and Melinda Gates.
Open Healthcare Framework Project The Eclipse Open Healthcare Framework (OHF) is a project within Eclipse formed for the purpose of expediting healthcare informatics technology. The project is composed of extensible frameworks and tools which emphasize the use of existing and emerging standards in order to encourage interoperable open source infrastructure, thereby lowering integration barriers. We currently provide tools and Frameworks for HL7, IHE, Terminology, Devices, and Public Healthcare Maintenance.
OpenMRS Community-developed, open-source, enterprise electronic medical record system platform. We've come together to specifically respond to those actively building and managing health systems in the developing world, where AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria afflict the lives of millions. Our mission is to foster self-sustaining health information technology implementations in these environments through peer mentorship, proactive collaboration, and a code base that equals or surpasses proprietary equivalents. You are welcome to come participate in our community, whether by implementing our software, or contributing your efforts to our mission!
ITK – Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit National Library of Medicine: ITK is an open-source, cross-platform system that provides developers with an extensive suite of software tools for image analysis. Developed through extreme programming methodologies, ITK employs leading-edge algorithms for registering and segmenting multidimensional data.
ipath allows the sharing of images and medical information for collaboration in case-based studies (referred to there as "case based collaboration"). It has particular utility in remote areas which have limited access to a specialist, and appears to be used in (or designed for) Africa. It supports different languages and stores the full information as a "case" for later retrieval and discussion. It is different than a desktop sharing program because the other person is not just viewing the information/program but is interacting with it in specific ways relating to his/her expertise.
EpiCollect Data collected by multiple field workers can be submitted by phone, together with GPS data, to a common web database and can be displayed and analysed, along with previously collected data, using Google Maps (or Google Earth). Similarly, data from the web database can be requested and displayed on the mobile phone, again using Google Maps.
Human rights
Martus Martus, the Greek word for "witness," is a software tool that allows users to document incidents of abuse by creating bulletins, and storing them on redundant servers located around the world. Using Martus helps countries torn apart by civil conflicts come to a consensus and rational understanding of their histories, leading to reconciliation and reform processes.
Libraries
Evergreen-ILS Highly-scalable software for libraries that helps library patrons find library materials, and helps libraries manage, catalog, and circulate those materials, no matter how large or complex the libraries.
Koha-ILS Koha is the first open-source Integrated Library System (ILS).
VuFind (Villanova University) Library resource portal designed and developed for libraries by libraries. The goal of VuFind is to enable your users to search and browse through all of your library's resources by replacing the traditional OPAC.
Microfinance
Mifos -- the Microfinance Open Source project Industry-wide initiative to address the microfinance industry's information management challenge. Using the open source paradigm, we are creating a new service model that will increase access to technology for all microfinance institutions, ultimately enabling them to extend their reach to the world’s poor. At the center of the initiative is the Mifos product, a freely available world-class management information system (MIS) that provides the core functionality required by microfinance institutions. See also The Community for Open Source Microfinance
Sangam Pro (micro finance) The Ecumenical Sangam's Microfinance (mF) scheme started in July 2008 and since then the Sangam has provided “refundable financial aid” to its former students of the Sangam’s technical and sewing classes. This financial aid is meant to be used for the start-up of small businesses such as tailoring shops and repair businesses. The initial funds to start this Microfinance scheme have been made available through the Sangam's German Partner DIZ who in turn obtained a grant from the Hessian State Ministry of Economic Affairs. Site that might be of interest: www.sksfoundation.org/ The SKS Ultra Poor Program works to address the challenges of extreme poverty through three linked interventions: economic, social and health, and aims to work with members so that they have the capacity to participate in mainstream microfinance after a period of 18 months. After the program is over, most members will choose to take a microfinance loan to grow their existing business or diversify income sources by starting new businesses.
Octopus Open Source Technologies for Microfinance Tool for a specific MFI in Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Kirgizstan, but to provide a general purpose MIS suitable for all Microfinance Institutions (MFI).
SimpleMFI Android based smart phone tool for microfinance loan officers.
NGO Administration
OpenPetra is a free and easy-to-use administration software package for non-profit organizations. Specifically designed to meet the administrative requirements of an international mission agency or other non-profit organisation, OpenPetra runs standalone or as a multi-user system in an office network or on the Internet.
Sigmah is free software developed to help international aid organizations manage the information from their projects: reports, indicators, schedules, documents etc.
ActivityInfo is an online humanitarian project monitoring tool, which helps humanitarian organizations to collect, manage, map and analyze indicators.
Privacy
The Guardian Project creates easy-to-use apps, mobile OS security enhancements, and customized mobile devices for people around the world to help them communicate more freely, and protect themselves from intrusion and monitoring.
FreeNet The FreeNet Project Free software which lets you anonymously share files, browse and publish "freesites" (web sites accessible only through Freenet) and chat on forums, without fear of censorship. Freenet is decentralised to make it less vulnerable to attack, and if used in "darknet" mode, where users only connect to their friends, is very difficult to detect.
Tor Free software and an open network that helps you defend against a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security known as traffic analysis. Hundreds of thousands of people around the world use Tor for a wide variety of reasons: journalists and bloggers, human rights workers, law enforcement officers, soldiers, corporations, citizens of repressive regimes, and just ordinary citizens.
ICT for Development
This section lists FOSS projects that are more general in nature, including ones that address ICT infrastructure areas such as communication, but that either have a clear humanitarian goal or have come to have some clear humanitarian application.
MySociety has two missions. The first is to be a charitable project which builds websites that give people simple, tangible benefits in the civic and community aspects of their lives. The second is to teach the public and voluntary sectors, through demonstration, how to use the internet most efficiently to improve lives.
The Magilas Project for the Philippines aims to cover every area of its 7,107 islands and 42,000 barangays - and the 34,580-feet-deep Philippine Trench. The word "magilas" means, among many other good things, "agile, clever, dynamic, quick-witted, sharp, smart, spirited, vigorous, and winged." The goal is to make breakthroughs by keeping things simple and "fitly joined together." We will use free or user-friendly resources. We will "baranganize" (relate to, apply to barangays) as many things as we effectively can. HE: This project aims to add technology to all parts of Philippine society, including health.
Communications
FrontlineSMS A family of projects aimed at applying text messaging in support of NGO work
Awaaz.De Awaaz.De (“Give your voice”) is a software platform enabling organizations to engage with poor, remote, and marginal communities by providing on-demand, many-to-many information access through mobile phones. People access Awaaz.De applications by dialing regular phone numbers to create, browse,and share voice content through automated voice interfaces. Voice makes it easy to provide services in local languages, overcomes literacy constraints, and offers a low barrier to content creation: one only needs to know how to speak into a phone.
Freedom Fone Freedom Fone addresses the need for simple, affordable, uncensored communication technology. It allows for frequently-updated, short segment audio programming. It removes the technical challenge of hosting and setting up the back-end, allowing users to concentrate on content.
FrontlineSMS Award-winning free, open source software that turns a laptop and a mobile phone into a central communications hub. Once installed, the program enables users to send and receive text messages with groups of people through mobile phones. What is communicated is up to the user, making FrontlineSMS useful in many different ways.
Managing News Managing News originated as a news aggregation and republishing platform heavily integrated with RSS/Atom. Users can track a diverse set of RSS/Atom feeds, visualize them, and republish selected reports on a platform that allows for mapping and pluggable visualizations. Managing News has subsequently added SMS functionality to the system. The system is based on Drupal, and integrates several open source projects including OpenLayers, SimplePie, and many Drupal plug-ins.
RapidSMS Free and open-source framework for dynamic data collection, logistics coordination and communication, leveraging basic short message service (SMS) mobile phone technology.
GeoChat Geochat emerged from a simple concept - can I send an SMS message and see it on a map? From there the concept has evolved, and geochat has become a project to build a collaboration platform for the lowest common denominator communication tools, considering as highest priorities the needs of workers of humantiarian aid, international health and disaster response. The main drivers for the project are the feedback of the InSTEDD programs in South East Asia, exercises such as GoldenShadow?, and a growing community of humanitarian and health workers who spend their days in technologically austere environments.
Ushahidi Ushahidi is a platform that allows anyone around the world to set up their own way to gather reports by mobile phone, email and the web - and visualize and map them. It is being built so that it can grow with the changing environment of the web, and to work with other websites and online tools.
Data Collection and Management
Martus Allows users to create a secure database that can be backed up remotely. Used world-wide by organizations to protect information on human rights abuses.
OpenXData is a community-developed, open-source, enterprise end-to-end software solution for handling virtually any type of forms based data collection and management using mobile devices and web forms (online or offline).Can us both high- and low-end mobile devices and mobile phones as well as in a regular web-browser to show and capture forms based data.
OpenROSA A consortium formed to create open source, standards-based tools for mobile data collection, aggregation, analysis, and reporting. By developing open source solutions and conforming to standards based on the XForms specification, our different projects can easily share code, data, ideas and infrastructure.
Open Data Kit A suite of tools to help organizations collect, aggregate and visualize their data. Our goals are to make open-source and standards-based tools which are easy to try, easy to use, easy to modify and easy to scale. To this end, we are proud members of the OpenMobile Consortium, the OpenRosa Consortium, and active participants in the JavaRosa project.
INSTEDD - Mesh4X A data mesh which allows information to be synchronized in a peer-to-peer way, allowing offline work, and synchronizing with whoever is available, not just a central database or a service on the internet. This makes it a perfect fit for situation where there is little/no connectivity or where the synchronization has to happen between different applications and services.
HFOSS Applications Created by Students
Finding HFOSS
This section identifies sites that are useful in locating HFOSS projects, and groups connected to HFOSS efforts.
Ohloh is a free public directory of open source software and people. Ohloh is a wiki, and anyone is welcome to join our community and add new projects to our directory, or to make corrections to existing directory pages. This public review makes Ohloh one of the largest, most accurate, and up-to-date software directories available.
Beaversource - A student-oriented FOSS hosting/social networking site located at Oregon State University
PhoenixForge A space for University of Chicago community members to host and organize open source software projects
The Global Health Information Network Site serves as an interactive online forum where professionals involved in procurement and HIS management can exchange views and information. The “Tools” tab lists commonly used tools, some of which are FOSS.
Social Source Commons A “knowledge commons” that provides users with: a directory of software applications; links to relevant documentation, localization tools, services, user reviews; and a place to request tools/features.
Free Software Conservancy Organization composed of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) projects. As a fiscal sponsor for FOSS projects, the Conservancy provides member projects with free financial and administrative services, but does not involve itself with technological and artistic decisions. Check out “Members” tab.
Idealist Project of Action Without Borders, a nonprofit organization founded in 1995 with offices in the United States and Argentina. Idealist is an interactive site where people and organizations can exchange resources and ideas, locate opportunities and supporters, and take steps toward building a world where all people can lead free and dignified lives.
Hackontest List of FOSS projects that were worked on during a contest held during the 2008 Logo OpenExpo Swiss Open Source Software Conference & Exposition.
OWASP The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) is a 501c3 not-for-profit worldwide charitable organization focused on improving the security of application software.
Random Hacks of Kindness "Random Hacks of Kindness is a community of innovation focused on developing practical open source solutions to disaster risk management and climate change adaptation challenges."
MobileActive's mDirectory Searchable directory of mobile HFOSS projects.
Humanitarian-ICT Project (Appears to be inactive - 2/2014)
InSTEDD "At InSTEDD we design and use open source technology tools to help partners enhance collaboration and improve information flow to better deliver critical services to vulnerable populations."
Forges
Many HFOSS projects are hosted by the general FOSS hosting sites which are commonly known as "forges". The larger forges are useful places to search for HFOSS projects.
GitHub Fork, send pull requests and manage all your public and private git repositories.
Launchpad is a software collaboration platform that provides bug tracking, code hosting using Bazaar, code reviews, Ubuntu package building and hosting, translations, mailing lists, answer tracking and FAQ, and specification tracking.
SourceForge Find, create, and publish Open Source software for free.
Project Hosting on Google Code provides a free collaborative development environment for open source projects. Each project comes with its own member controls, Subversion/Mercurial repository, issue tracker, wiki pages, and downloads section.
CodePlex is Microsoft's open source project hosting web site. You can use CodePlex to create new projects to share with the world, join others who have already started their own projects, or use the applications on this site and provide feedback.
License analysis tools
FOSSology Analyze all of the source code for a given project and intelligently report all of the licenses being used, based on the license declarations and tell-tale phrases that identify software licensing.
OSS Discovery finds the open source software embedded in applications and installed on computers. OSS Discovery helps enterprises better manage open source usage and remain compliant with internal policies, regulations, and software license terms.
Ninka is a lightweight license identification tool for source code. It is sentence-based, and provides a simple way to identify open source licenses in a source code file. It is capable of identifying several dozen different licenses (and their variations).
External Links
List of free and open source software packages
