Building a Pathway to HFOSS Contribution

Our most recent NSF proposal was funded! In September we heard that our project, “OpenPath – Improving Student Pathways to Computing Professions via Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software”, had been funded. This is a collaborative grant with Nassau Community College, Drexel University and Muhlenberg College. The focus of the grant is to create a pathway of course materials and activities that involve students in HFOSS. The activities span from freshman through senior year with the goal of producing open-source-ready students upon graduation. The effort builds on collaborative relationships with the Red Hat University Outreach team , the GNOME Accessibility team, and the OpenHatch project.

Most recently we had a meeting of the minds between FOSS community members and academics to start to figure out what knowledge and skills students need to gain during their academic career in order to be productive FOSS community members. Participants included:

• Devin Balkind – President, Sahana Software Foundation
• Saptarshi Purkayastha – Visiting Assistant Professor at IUPUI and contributor to OpenMRS API and web core
• Mel Chua – Ph.D. candidate in Engineering Education at Purdue University and former member of the Red Hat Education Outreach team
• Sara Terp – Data Scientist at ThoughtWorks and contributor to Ushahidi
• Avni Khatri – Program Manager, Knowledge and Learning Technologies, Lab of Computer Science at Massachusetts General Hospital and President of Kids On Computers
• Gina Likins – University Outreach, Open Source & Standards Team at Red Hat
• Karl Wurst – Professor at Worcester State University
• Team members Greg Hislop  from Drexel University and Darci Burdge and Lori Postner from Nassau Community College

While the need for students to gain technical skills such as version control and coding were obvious, I found it interesting that one of the main themes that occurred during the meeting was the need for students to gain soft skills. The need for students to become proficient in communication, problem solving, and critical thinking became apparent throughout the meeting. Another observation was the need for students to understand open source communities in general and to have the skills to navigate individual communities. Thank you to everyone who participated and we will continue to build on what we learned from the meeting.

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