In the fall I will be teaching an undergraduate course on social computational systems (human computation a la Luis von Ahn's work on Duolingo and reCaptcha, Amazon's Mechanical Turk, etc. as well as crowdsourcing ...)
Does anyone know of existing FOSS projects related to this topic area that my students could get involved in?
This might be too late already, but I didn't want Monisha's note to pass without an answer.
There don't seem to be any big FOSS projects on social computational systems (though I could be missing something). There *are* wrappers and interfaces to popular ones, like boto, http://docs.pythonboto.org/en/latest/index.html, a python interface to mechanical turk.
My gut feel tells me that an open *content* project might make a better host for this sort of class -- or an open source software project that has a task that could be crowdsourced (bug triage, for instance). You could have students solve a problem for an open {source, content, hardware, culture, etc} community by implementing a social computational system, using things like boto to hook the pieces together.
Alternatively, there are also FOSS projects that could be supercool if a social computational system was implemented in it. For instance, look at http://lwt.sourceforge.net, a multi-user webapp for learning how to read in a foreign language. Perhaps it might benefit from having a Duolingo-inspired feature added to it?
That's what first comes to my mind, anyhow. Curious as to what you ended up doing!
--Mel _______________________________________________ tos mailing list [email protected] http://lists.teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos
