Humanitarian Open Source

According to the Merrian Webster dictionary, the definition of the word humanitarian (adj) is “relating to or characteristic of people who work to improve the lives and living conditions of other people”. I think that by this definition, many open source projects could be classified as humanitarian effort. Making your technology public can come from self-serving motivations, but that doesn’t exclude the decision from being a social good. I don’t interact often with open source technology that immediately strikes us as humanitarian, like some of the projects we discussed in class this past week. Still, I think things like numpy and eigen are humanitarian in that they encourage the dissemination of knowledge and allow anyone to do numerical work more productively. Making all this stuff free and readily-available diminishes barriers to entering the CS world, which in itself is humanitarian.

More concisely, just because a project is not intended to address a specific humanitarian crisis or issue, it can still serve a humanitarian purpose.

## Group Progress

This week the group continued to read documentation and everyone got their development environments set up. We made a kanban board and populated it with some initial milestones that we hope to complete. We also spoke more about the nature of the contribution that we would like to make to Brackets, (whether we should try and work on bug fixes, or try and build an extension/plugin)

## Next Thing To Work On

I was able to make some trivial changes to the code and see those changes appear in the running application. I plan to look at some closed issues this week and undo all the changes that were made in the fix and then try and rework the solution myself. I also plan to check out some popular extensions for Brackets and see if we could realistically build a productive tool that could be plugged in to the application. This will help us decide how to proceed in contributing to our project.