Back in my week 1 blog post, I discussed about how I kind of didn’t understand why people were motivated to work on open source projects. However, after learning about how and why open source projects are used for humanitarian and social good, as well as getting involved myself in open source projects, contributing to open source projects kind of makes sense now.

(Note that I kind of grouped humanitarian and social good together–from the in class discussions and my gut feelings, they seem to be the same thing, as humanitarian seems to imply that the issue being resolved is way worse than social good (but others say that the line between the two is blurry and that it’s probably just a case of semantics)).

Simply put, the goals of open source fits really neatly with the needs of software technology for humanitarian and social good. Any software or technology that is needed for humanitarian good (in particular) will need to last for a long time. This kind of prevents any sort of licensed or proprietary software from being used for (especially) humanitarian good (as these software might be deployed in places where connections to the outside world might be limited and ways of authenticating software licenses might not work correctly, or the existing licensed or proprietary software might lose support if the hardware is too out of date and/or the hardware ends up failing and a newer replacement doesn’t work with existing software). Open software works around a few of these restrictions for humanitarian good by ensuring that the people running the software also have access to the original source code of the software currently running, so in an event that the people actually running the software at a remote place lose reliable access to the outside world, the people running the software should be able to maintain the software, add new features, and rebuild the software for newer hardware or operating systems when the time comes (provided that the people who collaborated on the initial deployment of the hardware and software have trained someone well enough or have a good amount of local talent to maintain the system in the first place).

In addition, organizations for humanitarian good have taken advantage of open source projects to cater to people who would otherwise be ignored by projects being made by for profit companies. For example, the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) does a lot of OpenStreetMaps mapping projects for places that may otherwise not be mapped (because it financially doesn’t make sense for profit companies to map locations where they cannot really earn money off of (or map locations that people from locations for profit companies profit off that said people would go to)). Yes, HOT might still ignore mapping places (as they tend to map places that have been impacted by natural diaster (for more accurate diaster response) or map undermapped places that might have the potential to be impacted by disasters in the future), but since this data is contributed to an open source mapping application, all this data is not trapped to being used for this one project–it can be used for other purposes, such as actual navigation in general.

I brought up the example of HOT, but the beauty of working on open source projects is that it’s a lot more accessible way of giving back to the community (as some people might not have the time to travel to a more distressed place to help out or have the strength to do such things, but may still want to give back). For example, I might really care about pollution in the Gowanus area, but I could never really do any of the dirty, environmental work for personal and borderline health reasons (and I would prefer to work on the data tracking solutions to the problem), so I could just work on open source projects designed for humanitarian and social good instead. (Concerningly, I feel like this is a bit deemphasized, as from my preliminary research, I never really get to see open source projects talk about what humanitarian or social good projects are built on top of their code or framework, and I (and most people) do get a bit of that feel-good energy whenever I (or said most people) contribute to something that helps people’s lives). addendum 3/4/25: I may had not been clear enough about the fact that I wanted something that people can actually interact with, since I like solving problems people face, but backend feels a bit too far from that realm

Speaking of the feel-good emotions, it kinda feels good to do a little bit of those small contributions onto Wikipedia (mainly), OpenStreetMaps, and the course materials. It has went mostly well, though I do kinda feel annoyed when I literally find out someone else got their Wikipedia article on a news event (such as that Delta crash in Toronto) published first. It kinda makes me feel annoyed about if my work was worth it, or if I should have been careful about checking to make sure there wasn’t already an existing draft in progress (or under actual review). I’ve also made some GitHub and OpenStreetMap contributions (such as fixing typos and adding missing information about different locations), without much fuss (besides having to ping people on GitHub or playing the waiting game because GitHub contributions are pretty reliant on others approving changes or acting on making changes), since I didn’t try to do anything major on either of those places. I am really proud of the few changes I made when a new iPhone came out (and being one of the first few people to make the changes), as I feel like the first few contributions to an article are pretty important for the article to not get deleted and for the structure of the article to take shape.

addendum March 4th, 2025

Maybe I was a bit too specific on the taking stock activity, but I was going to go for an iOS thing (but nobody else did). I was open to JavaScript, but I didn’t emphasize this enough. (Or maybe I didn’t emphasize enough on the fact that I preferred something that people can actually interact with.) Massive oops.