Notes on Social/Ethical class III: Social good in computing

The assigned reading turned out to be rather old and out-of-date – a blog post published in 2016. Some of the links were broken, and others linked to organizations that are no longer active. The instructor apologized for assigning a problematic reading, but also explained that this was a good learning opportunity: we should always approach any text skeptically, asking basic questions about when it was written, who wrote it, what was their research process, and so on.

In any case, the overall theme of the reading remains valid. There are many opportunities to benefit society via a career in computing or computation.

The remainder of the session was real-time research and discussion of open-source software. “Source” refers to source code – that is, computer programs written in a programming language. “Open” refers to the fact that open-source software makes its source code available for anyone to download, inspect, and alter. Open-source software is also generally available for free. Sometimes it is known as FOSS (free open-source software). Some FOSS projects have a humanitarian aspect and these are known as HFOSS projects. All FOSS projects, whether humanitarian or not, benefit society by providing free software. This is one important positive impact of computing on our society.

In class we discussed five important open-source projects: the Linux operating system, the MySQL database, the Apache web server, OpenMRS (a medical records system), and OpenStreetMap (a database of maps and associated software, similar to Google Maps).