HFOSS - Interview with Ralph Morelli (Trinitty College)

Here is Ralph Morelli's interview, he is one of the HFOSS organizers. He is a professor in the Computer Science department at Trinity College.

You can either watch the interview or read his answers.



This video is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License

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What's the big picture opportunity in connecting education and open source?

• he believes that is very possible
  
• open-source has spread to more than just in software development; examples of this are: wikipedia, open-source science, open-source politics...
• if open-source has broaden, it will eventually become part of the Computer Science in academia

What specific projects or courses are you working on that make the link between open source and education?

• they have several projects in Humanitarian FOSS
• they are involved with Sahana, an open-source disaster management system
  
• they wrote a module to help coordinate volunteers
  
• this system is being used in New York city
  
• in China, the module has been tried to be internationalised
• another projects are being done for Google Andriod
• Ralph believes that Android is going to revolutionize the hand-held field
  
• the project connects with the Sahana project to recognize victims of a disaster

Do you have any advice on how Mozilla could best engage with educators and students?

• Ralph taught a FOSS101 class for non CS major students
• Students loved the Mozilla project and how it is important for the big software development ecosystem
  
• even students that are not computer science majors can get involved into the Mozilla project
  
• if students can say to other students that they are contributing to a product that they use might help other students to gain interest in computer science

NOTE: Modified to add license note