Open Source Projects for the Benefit of Humanity

At the end of September, a large Open World Forum conference was held in Paris, for the first time a section of the Humanitarian FOSS was organized, dedicated to “humanitarian” open source projects. The software of this kind is created truly disinterestedly, with the awareness of the enormous importance of the business. These are the things Tim O'Reilly calls the work that matters (Stuff that Matters) - which is more important than money.

"Humanitarian" systems are divided into two classes. The first helps to save human lives in critical situations. For example, free software was actively used during the assistance to tsunami victims in Japan. Another example is that activists in Tunisia used open source tools to preserve anonymity and communication on the Internet (under the conditions of a totalitarian regime, this is also a matter of life and death).

Second class - programs for education, health, etc.

Here are some examples of open source programs that were discussed at the Open World Forum.
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Crisis management

• Sahana project appeared after the 2004 tsunami in Sri Lanka, it helps volunteers, government and humanitarian organizations to coordinate work in one area, to publish reports on missing persons, track incidents and cooperate with each other.
• Sigmah is a project management system for non-governmental organizations.

Sustainable development : when the crisis is over, it is time to rebuild the infrastructure and solve systemic problems with education, medicine, sanitation, human rights

• SMS remains a priority way of communication in the third world countries, because in Africa, Asia and South America, cellular communication works more reliably than land lines, electrical networks or the Internet, which is why FrontlineSMS is so important for providing convenient communications. It allows you to conveniently send SMS from a computer by connecting a cheap cell phone or GSM modem to it.
• Sugar : The operating system created for schools in the third world is part of the famous One Laptop Per Child project, which is being promoted by the UN and should help developing countries use computer technology.
• The Martus program to record, encrypt, and securely store human rights violations bulletins.
• Mifos platform for microfinance organizations.
• Portal and software Akvo , which brings together charitable projects around the world, mainly in the field of water purification and water supply.
• The European Open Bank project promotes financial transparency and the use of common open standards, interfaces, protocols and web applications by banks. In the future, this will help fight corruption and open up a number of new opportunities: for example, the user can, if he wishes, broadcast all his expenses on a plastic card to Twitter. On the other hand, all transactions on the accounts of state organizations will be automatically and necessarily published in open access so that citizens can keep track of them (now this information is closed purely for technical reasons, because citizens have every right to know every item of expenditure of a budget organization).

In addition to these, there are a huge number of small open source programs in narrow areas. Many developers are doing socially important, but specific projects for a specific task, for their city or organization (for example, like the same census of holes on Russian roads ). There are too many such tasks. If you want to participate and help in the development of social software, share the existing code, throw an idea - join the movement Social Coding 4 Good , which brings together volunteers and non-profit organizations around the world. This is a kind of analogue of the Apache Software Foundation in the humanitarian field, it coordinates the development of several projects.

via Safe as Milk