HFOSS Projects
From TeachingOpenSource
This page contains lists of HFOSS and FOSS applications that could possibly serve as student projects. The projects are at various levels of maturity and have a range of complexity. This list could serve as an initial starting point in identifying possible HFOSS and FOSS communities with which to work.
- For a shorter, more curated list of HFOSS projects that have volunteered to participate in foss2serve activities, see HFOSS Communities.
- For additional projects and resources for FOSS developers as well as links to other helpful FOSS related resources, see HFOSS_Projects_Full_List.
HFOSS Projects by Application Area
This is a list of known HFOSS projects that are known to be active. The last comprehensive update of the table was April 2016.
| Name | Description | Category | Source | Language |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tanaguru | Asqatasun is a fork of this project. Tanaguru is an opensource (AGPL license) website assessment tool. It is dedicated to accessibility (a11y) audits, and focuses on reliability and high level of automation. Tanaguru automates 167 accessibility tests (WCAG, Section 508, AccessiWeb). Evaluating a page, an entire site or a web application is reliable, intuitive and self accessible. | Accessibility | GitHub | Java |
| Asqatasun | Asqatasun is the leading opensource software for web accessibility (#a11y) since 2007. Built with reliability in mind, it also addresses SEO concerns, and is extensible to any other domain.
Asqatasun provides a huge level of automation and can be included in Continuous Integration thanks to its Jenkins Plugin. |
Accessibility | GitHub | Java |
| Tanaguru Contrast Finder | Find valid background / foreground color contrast for accessibility (a11y, WCAG). | Accessibility | GitHub | Java |
| Benetech Java projects | A search on Benetech projects in GitHub. Benetech is a nonprofit that empowers communities in need by creating scalable technology solutions, | Accessibility | GitHub | Java |
| Firefox Accessibility Plugins | Not all of the Firefox extensions listed here were made for accessibility purposes, but they are all helpful in one way or another for those who may have specific needs in how web content is presented to them and how they interact with it. | Accessibility | Mozilla | ? |
| Amara | Amara gives individuals, communities, and larger organizations the power to overcome accessibility and language barriers for online video. The tools are free and open source and make the work of subtitling and translating video simpler, more appealing, and, most of all, more collaborative. | Accessibility | GitHub | Python |
| Empathy | Messaging program which supports text, voice, and video chat and file transfers over many different protocols. You can tell it about your accounts on all those services and do all your chatting within one application. (Contributing guide) | Accessibility | GNOME Git | C |
| Poet Image Description | An application to increase the availability of image descriptions in textbooks for print disabled students. This image description web service will enable authors/content creators, publishers, social enterprises, such as Bookshare, educators and volunteers to easily add, enhance, moderate and share image descriptions to e-books and digital textbooks in the DAISY 3, EPUB and HTML standards. | Accessibility | GitHub | Ruby |
| Wheelmap | Wheelmap.org is an online map to search, find and mark wheelchair-accessible places. Wheelmap is built on Open Street Map. | Accessibility | GitHub | Ruby |
| Humanitarian Emergency Lifeline Project | HELP aims to overcome challenges facing humanitarian relief by empowering donors, communities and organizations to provide better assistance. HELP will establish a transparent and accountable system to connect donors with people affected by disasters. | Humanitarian Relief | ||
| Helios | A web-based comprehensive supply chain solution for the humanitarian and disaster relief sector which aims to provides better access to supply chain information to enhance decision-making at every level throughout the aid delivery process. | Humanitarian Relief | ||
| Miradi | A program that allows nature conservation practitioners to design, manage, monitor, and learn from their projects to more effectively meet their conservation goals. The program guides users through a series of step-by-step interview wizards, based on the Open Standards for the Practice of Conservation. | Ecology | GitHub | Java |
| mWater | Free Android app for low cost community based water quality monitoring. The site describes the app as "open source", but it's not clear whether additional project participants are wanted. Other FOSS project characteristics (source code, licensing, open project operations, etc.) are not visible. | Ecology | GitHub | Java |
| Celestia | "The free space simulation that lets you explore our universe in three dimensions." | Education | ||
| Instructure Canvas | Canvas is a learning management system distributed as a FOSS product by Instructure. Instructure is a relatively new company with venture capital backing. Canvas is distributed as FOSS and offered as a service for a fee. | Education | GitHub | Ruby |
| OpenOffice for Kids | A software (work in progress) designed for 7-12 children, based on OpenOffice.org source code, but simplified. This means OpenOffice.org has some features OOo4Kids has not. | Education | Java | |
| Moodle | "Moodle is a learning platform designed to provide educators, administrators and learners with a single robust, secure and integrated system to create personalised learning environments" | Education | GitHub | PHP |
| openStudent | A student information system for British Columbia Schools. | Education | ||
| Apereo Sakai | The Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment is developed by a community that strives to enable exceptional teaching, learning and research. Sakai collaborators - ranging from educators to engineers - share in their successes and challenges, honing the community's collective expertise to drive rapid development of this enterprise-ready platform. | Education | GitHub | Java |
| Sugar Labs | Spin-off from OLPC (one laptop per child) that is doing software to create a learning environment for children. The award-winning Sugar Learning Platform promotes collaborative learning through Sugar Activities that encourage critical thinking, the heart of a quality education. Designed from the ground up especially for children, Sugar offers an alternative to traditional “office-desktop” software. | Education | GitHub | Python |
| OpenArms (URL no longer works) | An open-source software project that aims to help food banks match up donors with those in need. Organizers can use the software to create templates for hampers. Groups or individuals can choose to sponsor a family and then use the web site to manage the donations. | Food Bank/Pantry | ||
| Open Pantry | An Interactive Qualifying Project by two Worcester Polytechnic Institute students. This software aims to provide an efficient way to manage and organize clients, inventory, distribution and reporting for volunteers and employees at TEFAP and MEFAP funded food pantries. The solution is specifically aimed toward the needs of the Burlington Food Pantry, however it is designed in such a way that it should be reusable by other similar organizations. | Food Bank/Pantry | ||
| Food Bank Markup Language | FBML (Food Bank Markup Language) is written using XML, and will have an application written in Python to enable the use of FBML in the background; and will be OS agnostic. | Food Bank/Pantry | ||
| OpenHealthMapper | Project under Open Health, OpenHealthMapper is a user-friendly data management and mapping system customized specifically for public health users. The system facilitates data standardization, collection and updating of data on epidemiology and on interventions and provides immediate visualization of data in the form of maps, tables and charts. | Healthcare | ||
| Nightscout | "Nightscout (CGM in the Cloud) is an open source, DIY project that allows real time access to a CGM data via personal website, smartwatch viewers, or apps and widgets available for smartphones." | Healthcare | GitHub | Java, Javascript |
| Glucosio | "User-centered free and open source apps for diabetes management and research" | Healthcare | GitHub | Java, Objective-C |
| X-Chart | X-Chart is an XML-based open source health record. Since it uses an open source code, it is distributed free of charge by the Open Healthcare Group. | Healthcare | ||
| Epidemiological Modeler (STEM) | A tool designed to help scientists and public health officials create and use spatial and temporal models of emerging infectious diseases. These models can aid in understanding and potentially preventing the spread of such diseases. | Healthcare | Eclipse SVN | Java |
| OpenVista | OpenVista is a cost-effective, open, trusted and complete EHR which enhances patient safety, increases clinical and operational efficiency and provides an opportunity to improve quality of care delivery. | Healthcare | ||
| OpenEPI | Provides statistics for counts and measurements in descriptive and analytic studies, stratified analysis with exact confidence limits, matched pair and person-time analysis, sample size and power calculations, random numbers, sensitivity, specificity and other evaluation statistics, R x C tables, chi-square for dose-response, and links to other useful sites. | Healthcare | GitHub | |
| OpenMRS | Community-developed, open-source, enterprise electronic medical record system platform. We've come together to specifically respond to those actively building and managing health systems in the developing world, where AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria afflict the lives of millions. Our mission is to foster self-sustaining health information technology implementations in these environments through peer mentorship, proactive collaboration, and a code base that equals or surpasses proprietary equivalents. You are welcome to come participate in our community, whether by implementing our software, or contributing your efforts to our mission! | Healthcare | GitHub | Java |
| Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit | National Library of Medicine: ITK is an open-source, cross-platform system that provides developers with an extensive suite of software tools for image analysis. Developed through extreme programming methodologies, ITK employs leading-edge algorithms for registering and segmenting multidimensional data. | Healthcare | GitHub | C++ |
| iPath Telemedicine Platform | Allows the sharing of images and medical information for collaboration in case-based studies (referred to there as "case based collaboration"). It has particular utility in remote areas which have limited access to a specialist, and appears to be used in (or designed for) Africa. It supports different languages and stores the full information as a "case" for later retrieval and discussion. It is different than a desktop sharing program because the other person is not just viewing the information/program but is interacting with it in specific ways relating to his/her expertise. | Healthcare | ||
| EpiCollect | Data collected by multiple field workers can be submitted by phone, together with GPS data, to a common web database and can be displayed and analysed, along with previously collected data, using Google Maps (or Google Earth). Similarly, data from the web database can be requested and displayed on the mobile phone, again using Google Maps. | Healthcare | ||
| Drone 4 Dengue | "Drone for Dengue (D4D) is a system for detecting dengue mosquito breeding sites via drone images." | Healthcare | GitHub | JavaScript, HTML |
| Martus | Martus, the Greek word for "witness," is a software tool that allows users to document incidents of abuse by creating bulletins, and storing them on redundant servers located around the world. Using Martus helps countries torn apart by civil conflicts come to a consensus and rational understanding of their histories, leading to reconciliation and reform processes. | Human rights | GitHub | Java |
| OpenEvSys | (REPLACED by UWAZI) A free and open source database application developed by HURIDOCS that human rights NGOs can use to: Record human rights violations and store related documents; Browse the history of a particular victim or perpetrator; Analyse trends and patterns of abuse; Track their interventions by status, impact, deadline, etc. | Human rights | GitHub | PHP |
| Evergreen ILS | Highly-scalable software for libraries that helps library patrons find library materials, and helps libraries manage, catalog, and circulate those materials, no matter how large or complex the libraries. | Libraries | GitHub | Perl |
| Koha ILS | Koha is a free software integrated library system (ILS). | Libraries | GitHub | Perl |
| VuFind | A library resource discovery portal designed and developed for libraries by libraries | Libraries | GitHub | PHP |
| Mifos (Apache Fineract) | Industry-wide initiative to address the microfinance industry's information management challenge. Using the open source paradigm, we are creating a new service model that will increase access to technology for all microfinance institutions, ultimately enabling them to extend their reach to the world’s poor. At the center of the initiative is the Mifos product, a freely available world-class management information system (MIS) that provides the core functionality required by microfinance institutions. | Microfinance | GitHub | Java |
| Simple MFI | An Android application built for microfinance loan officers, designed to help them be more efficient in the field, and to ultimately to be able to manage more loans more easily. | Microfinance | GitHub | Java |
| OpenPetra.org | A free and easy-to-use administration software package for non-profit organizations. Specifically designed to meet the administrative requirements of an international mission agency or other non-profit organisation, OpenPetra runs standalone or as a multi-user system in an office network or on the Internet. | NGO Administration | GitHub | C# |
| Sigmah | Free software developed to help international aid organizations manage the information from their projects: reports, indicators, schedules, documents etc. | NGO Administration | GitHub | Java |
| ActivityInfo | An online humanitarian project monitoring tool, which helps humanitarian organizations to collect, manage, map and analyze indicators. | NGO Administration | GitHub | Java |
| Cadasta | "Technology to help communities document their land rights around the world." | Property Rights | GitHub | Python |
| Apertium (wiki) | "Apertium is a free/open-source machine translation platform..." | Translation | Sourceforge |
