Raleigh, NC — March 28, 2017 — Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today recognized 21 higher education instructors for their continuing efforts to incorporate open source philosophies, methods, and tools into their academic work.

A consistent development environment across students and faculty for a course, assignment, or a project is desirable to reduce unintended, time consuming, and frustrating failures that distract from intended learning goals. Faculty and institutions have tried various approaches to reduce these distractions (e.g., labs, laptop requirements, and remote access to servers). These problems are not isolated to academia. Industry also has also been struggling with these issues and has developed various practices and technologies to combat them. Most recently, container technology (e.g., Docker) has emerged as a mechanism for packaging applications into relatively lightweight containers that isolate each application and its dependencies in a way that can be easily distributed to others. Visual Studio Code, with its Development Containers, has further expanded containers to packaging and distributing development environments customized for development of a specific application. Faculty have begun to leverage this technology to create and distribute to their students independent, lightweight, customized development environments for a particular course, example, or assignment.

Engaging students in humanitarian free and open source software (HFOSS) projects allows them to gain real-world software development skills while helping society. For years the authors have been working to encourage student and faculty participation in HFOSS projects and communities, but they have found that participating in an existing HFOSS project, although ripe with learning opportunities, presents a number of hurdles for faculty and students. An alternative to joining an existing HFOSS project community is to participate in a faculty-led HFOSS project. These projects provide the instructor with more control over the learning environment, but often lack an active community outside of the classroom.

Student participation in Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software (HFOSS) communities and projects has many benefits --- students get experience working on authentic software projects, with large codebases, real users, and communities of experienced developers to interact with. But, the learning curve for working within these project communities can be steep, requiring a significant investment of time and effort to navigate and integrate into the project's community. This may be enough to prevent some faculty and students from attempting to join a community, or to give up after trying.

Engaging students in humanitarian free and open source software (HFOSS) projects allows them to gain real-world software development skills while helping society. Participating in an existing HFOSS project, although ripe with learning opportunities, presents a number of hurdles for faculty and students. An alternative to joining an existing HFOSS project community is to participate in a faculty-led HFOSS project. These projects provide the instructor with more control over the learning environment, but often lack an active community outside of the classroom. This paper describes a multi-institutional effort to engage a community of developers in creating humanitarian open source projects to support their on-campus food pantries. Food insecurity on campus has become a national concern and many institutions have, or are starting, food pantries to support the student, staff, and faculty community. Starting a faculty-led HFOSS project involves making decisions not only about the features of the project but also about community norms, tool choices, project development workflow, and inter-institution cooperation. This paper provides an overview of the creation of LibreFoodPantry, a community who is developing a suite of projects that support on-campus food pantries. It describes instances of using LibreFoodPantry's projects in various classroom settings, the lessons learned from these experiences, and the resulting discussions and decisions made by the LibreFoodPantry Coordinating Committee. This process has led to a community dedicated to easing the on-ramp for faculty who want to help their students contribute to an HFOSS project.

Coordinating Committee Member, Founding Trustee

Project Leadership Committee Member

Past Regional Board Member 2001-2021, Past Webmaster and Past Deputy Webmaster, Past Conference Chair and Co-Chair