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foss2serve

foss2serve is a hub for activity related to student participation in humanitarian free and open source projects.

Construction of foss2serve started in November 2012 and is still at an early stage. You can browse the existing pages in two ways:

• By Category
• By a list of All Pages

Eventually, this site will bring together work from several prior projects. That work is available here:

SoftHum

HumIT

Foss2serve Faculty Workshop

The next faculty workshop to build the community of instructors interested in teaching students how to participate in open source communities will be held in Philadelphia on June 2-4, 2013. For information click here .

Purpose of foss2serve

Foss2serve promotes student learning via participation in humanitarian Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) projects. Humanitarian FOSS projects exist to meet a social need in areas such as health care, economic development, disaster management, ecology, and education. Becoming a participant in these projects is appealing to many people, but there is a learning curve that can create a daunting barrier to entry. Foss2serve aims to reduce that learning curve for instructors and students.

Foss2serve has grown out of efforts by university faculty to find ways for students to participate in humanitarian FOSS projects. Early explorations indicate that student participation in FOSS projects opens excellent educational opportunities. Participation in humanitarian projects adds additional facets that can be highly motivating and educational. Foss2serve retains this focus on instructors and students in higher education. But foss2serve also tries to make learning resources available to anyone wanting to participate in a FOSS project.

Foss2serve is a part of the teachingopensource.org community, and can be thought of as a group within that community with particular interest in humanitarian FOSS projects.

Goals of foss2serve

The overarching goal is to promote student participation in humanitarian FOSS communities. To support that goal, foss2serve will:

• Provide faculty development programs to help instructors gain competency in humanitarian FOSS
• Build small learning communities focused on particular humanitarian FOSS projects for teachers, learners, and FOSS developers
• Create, collect, and share learning materials to teach students how to participate in humanitarian FOSS projects