When I enrolled in this course in the fall, I had heard a bit about open source, but I was excited about the opportunity to learn more. I understood open source as strictly a technological idea. I knew that it allowed different contributors to edit code and collaborate to improve a problem. Furthermore, I wondered about the motivation behind open source. Why would someone offer up their code or their work in order for free? If someone had a great idea, why would they not privatize it and try to profit from it? However as we progressed, I realized the wide array of applications that open source can have in our lives and the ways it can improve day-to-day life. Through the various topics we explored, culminating in the final project, I realized that we must be having more discussions about how to take advantage of all the incredible solutions that people are developing and how they benefit the “common good”.
The topics we covered in this course included, but were not limited to: innovation and product development, inequality, energy, education, food and agriculture, communication, health, infrastructure, and climate change and mitigation. Combining our engaging class discussions with relevant research for our blog posts, I felt that I was constantly surprised and impressed by the different ways that open source could manifest itself in each of these different sectors of our world. In a sense, the structure of the class represented an idealized open source community where we all worked individually to present ideas to the class before using those ideas as a platform for discussion. It was also fascinating to see how the open source community and open source innovations are continuing to be made around us, demonstrating the fluidity of the space. One topic that particularly resonated with me was Health. In my blog, I discussed the Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering and their most recent efforts against coronavirus. While this virus has severely impacted many people and significantly altered our educational experience, it was exciting to witness the progress being made in the open source community, especially in order to help resolve this crisis. Johns Hopkins’s open data collection platform was a quintessential example of how the use of open source can benefit society significantly.
While I was very interested in the topics that I researched and that I heard about from peers in class, I felt that the experience in the class that resonated with me the most was the expert interview we conducted for our final project. We reached out to Mauricio Cordova, the founder of FairCap, an open source water filter, in order to find out more about his company and how he integrates open source into his product. Mauricio had an incredible background, describing to us all the different Maker’s Fairs and open source workshops he had attended all around the world. Having grown up in Peru, a country that struggles to this day with access to clean water, he had a particular intrinsic motivation for this project. Nonetheless, his social entrepreneurship and resourcefulness were inspiring to my group members and me. His use of open source allowed him to create the best, most affordable product in order to benefit thousands of people and help resolve the world-wide water crisis.
Overall, I really enjoyed being part of this class, and I am excited to see how open source can continue to benefit people in the future. Learning in such a collaborative environment from Professor Etienne, Laura, and my peers was a great experience and great exposure to a new topic. I believe that open source has the potential to become even more prevalent in society, and understanding such a new topic will be beneficial as it grows in popularity.
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