<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><xml><records><record><source-app name="Biblio" version="7.x">Drupal-Biblio</source-app><ref-type>17</ref-type><contributors><authors><author><style face="normal" font="default" size="100%">Chris McPhee</style></author><author><style face="normal" font="default" size="100%">Leslie Hawthorn</style></author></authors></contributors><titles><title><style face="normal" font="default" size="100%">Editorial: Humanitarian Open Source (December 2010)</style></title><secondary-title><style face="normal" font="default" size="100%">Open Source Business Resource</style></secondary-title></titles><dates><year><style  face="normal" font="default" size="100%">2010</style></year><pub-dates><date><style  face="normal" font="default" size="100%">12/2010</style></date></pub-dates></dates><urls><web-urls><url><style face="normal" font="default" size="100%">http://timreview.ca/article/398</style></url></web-urls></urls><publisher><style face="normal" font="default" size="100%">Talent First Network</style></publisher><pub-location><style face="normal" font="default" size="100%">Ottawa</style></pub-location><language><style face="normal" font="default" size="100%">eng</style></language><abstract><style face="normal" font="default" size="100%">In recent years, our increasingly connected world has provided us with a greater understanding of the needs of our fellow global citizens. The devastating worldwide impact of natural disasters, disease, and poverty has been raised in our collective awareness and our ability to collectively alleviate this suffering has been brought to the fore. While many of us are familiar with donating our funds to better the lives of those less fortunate than ourselves, it is often easy to overlook a core component of facing these global challenges: information technology.

The humanitarian open source movement seeks to ameliorate these sufferings through the creation of IT infrastructure to support a wide array of goals for the public good, such as providing effective healthcare or microloans to the poorest of the poor. Achieving these goals requires a sophisticated set of software and hardware tools, all of which work to save and improve lives in some of the most difficult of situations where the availability of electricity, data, IT knowledge, etc. may be low or lacking altogether. It should come as no surprise that the humanitarian open source domain attracts a great deal of attention from software developers, engineers, and others who find that they are able to both solve intense technical challenges while helping to improve the lives of others.

However, to support ongoing humanitarian needs, the communities who produce humanitarian free and open source software (HFOSS) and hardware have increasingly identified the need for business models to support their efforts. While the lower cost of using open source software and hardware solutions means that more funds can be directed to aid and comfort those in need, the goodwill of developer communities and the funds of grantees alone cannot grow the ecosystem sufficiently to meet ever-growing global needs. To face these challenges - poverty, global health crises, disaster relief, etc. - humanitarian open source projects must fully engage the market and provide cost-effective, efficient solutions to the technical aspects of these challenges.

In this issue of the OSBR, our authors from several open source software and hardware projects explore not only the global need for humanitarian open source projects, but also the business cases for humanitarian-focused ICT.</style></abstract><issue><style face="normal" font="default" size="100%">December 2010</style></issue><work-type><style face="normal" font="default" size="100%">Editorial</style></work-type><custom1><style face="normal" font="default" size="100%">Open Source Business Resource
Chris McPhee is in the Technology Innovation Management program at Carleton University in Ottawa. Chris received his BScH and MSc degrees in Biology from Queen's University in Kingston, following which he worked in a variety of management, design, and content development roles on science education software projects in Canada and Scotland.</style></custom1><custom2><style face="normal" font="default" size="100%">Oregon State University's Open Source Lab
Leslie Hawthorn is the Open Source Outreach Manager for &lt;a href=&quot;http://osuosl.org/&quot; target=&quot;_blank&quot;&gt;Oregon State University's Open Source Lab&lt;/a&gt;. Previously, she was Program Manager for Google's Open Source Programs Office, where she was the Community Manager for the Google Summer of Code community. She conceived, launched, and managed the Google Highly Open Participation Contest (now Google Code-in), the world's first global initiative to get pre-university students involved in all aspects of Open Source software development. Leslie has also organized more than 100 open source conferences and hackathons, most held at Google's Corporate Headquarters in Mountain View, California, USA. When not wrangling FOSS developers, she's usually speaking about Open Source, FOSS in education, and community building. Leslie holds a Honors B.A. in English Language and Literature from U.C. Berkeley. Her personal website is &lt;a href=&quot;http://hawthornlandings.org&quot; target=&quot;_blank&quot;&gt;hawthornlandings.org&lt;/a&gt;.</style></custom2></record></records></xml>