Evaluating Social Good Open Source Projects

This week we had the opportunity to learn more about open source projects that were for social good. I was surprised to learn that so many open source projects are actually focused on humanitarian needs. In my opinion, open source, due to its collaborative and transparent nature, is the perfect platform to build software for social good. During class, I had the opportunity to work with some of my classmates on evaluating Hospital Run. From our evaluation, we were able to determine that Hospital Run would be a great open source project to contribute to since they had decent documentation and it seemed like a friendly community.

Working with Oppia

This week we have continued working with Oppia to polish our site’s wireframes. This week we paid particular attention to the design of the site focusing on font size, element heights, and margins. While working with Oppia, I have realized the detailed nature of designing a product, such as site. I have also learned the importance of building a site for the user. It is important to understand how a user will perceive the site we are building. We want our site to look clean, be easy to navigate, and have a pleasing aesthetic. Keeping in mind all these details has been challenging.

We were able to start coding our site this week. Karishma, Selam, and I were able to successfully set up our local environments and have started on building the site. At first, we struggled a bit with using GitHub, but we were able to help one another. We have decided that we will build each page of our site together. For this week, we will be focusing on building the Welcome Page of our teachers and parents guide.

We will be meeting with Sean, a director at Oppia, to discuss any problems that have come up while trying to build the site. So far, we have set up the basic framework for the site. We are having trouble with the webpack_bundle files and this is making it hard for us to run a demo version of our site. Hopefully, Sean will be able to help us figure out the issues we are running into.