Humanitarian/Social Good Projects

This week, we learned about how open source is used to adress some problems in our world, including food and agriculture, knowledge accessibility, healthcare, and collective science. I chose to specificly watch the videos on Democratizing Knowledge in Higher Education. I chose this specific topic because I feel as a college student, I can relate to the high costs of textbooks, and I feel the issue is very relevant to my immediate life. Textbooks are expensive, and sometimes inadequte and not suited to the course material. Speaking from personal experience, there have been way too many times where I purchace a “required” textbook, and the professor did not even refer to the textbook and I did not touch the textbook once. One thing that I was surprised about learning is the willingness of strangers across the globe to contribute to a single project and goal. I think I really underestimated the effect and productivness of open source projects before the class.

One question I had was how these projects are funding their operations. Even if the contributions such as textbook writing by professors are done as volunteering for the “greater good,” there are still costs such as database, server, and other costs. One example brought up in class was that of iNaturalist. The amount of data on that site would no doubt be very costly, and yet they still were looking to hire employees. Where was that money coming from? Apparently, a lot of these big open source projects are backed by foundations, as well as donors.

What role, do I think, I could play as a computer scientist to address some of the issues mentioned in the discussion and videos? As a computer scientist, I feel like a lot of issues can be solved or improved on with the right software/data analysis. The issue is not whether the problem is impossible to solve or not, but rather finding people who are willing to work on these issues, or the money to pay for the salaries to work on it. This is why I think open source projects are so vital, becuase it opens up possibilities to find people with a real passion for specific issues and gives them a platform to work on it.

Progress on contributions

At the time of writing this blog, I have made 3 contributions so far. One to wikipedia, one within the course, and a small contribution to FreeCodeCamp. The hardest part was getting started. I feel like in order to make contributions, there needs to be a certian level of confidence within myself of whether it is possible for me to contribute. However, once I got started, I slowly start to realise that it is well within my capablitiies to contribute.

Wikipedia

This was surpisingly easy to edit, and I didn’t realise how easy it was to change pages. I edited my high schools wikipedia page, and I thought I did a pretty good job of adding information, as I went to that school and found relevant citations. However, 15 minutes after I made my changes, a specific user deleted everything. This was very fustrating, as I personally do not agree with his reasoning, and after diving a little deeper into that persons contribution history on wikipedia, he has a history of removing lots of information and other users also seem to be very fustrated by this person.

Small Issue

I saw an issue that another classmate raised on one of the widget projects, TikTock. It was a simple issue where widget had inconsistant heights. It was a simple change in the CSS stying, but felt nice to respond and fix an issue.

FreeCodeCamp

This was a very simple issue, but I learned and gained the most confidence from this one. FreeCodeCamp is a large open source project, so following the steps to fork the repo, respond to the issue, and submit a pull request, and then to get it approved after making some minor changes was very rewarding, and good practice for how to contribute to a large project, even of the contribution itself was small.