FOSS at Magic

Today I made it to FOSS at Magic for the first, and unfortunately last, time. I say last because this was the last one of the semester and I’m graduating! Either way, I’m glad I made it to the talk, as it was very interesting, and it was cool to see some of the RIT FOSS community together in one place. I think the discussion among the crowd is actually what made this event really fun for me.

The subject of the talk given today was the Virtual Student Federal Service program, or VFSF for short. This program is an internship opportunity for anyone who has student status. How it works is the federal office in charge of this program will send out a form to about 60 federal offices asking if there are any software projects they may need done. Maybe they want some pdf guide transcribed into a helpful online tutorial, or maybe they need a paper form turned into an accessible portal. Who knows. After a few months, all the projects are put up on the program website, and students can apply to look at them. After an interview process, the student can be brought on to the project and will do some amount of work every week on the project, maybe 10-20 hours, or whatever works best for them.

This is the information that I got from the event, and to be honest it felt more like a recruiting session and less like an informative talk. I’m unsure if this is the normal format of these talks, but I felt more like someone wanted to hire me, not inform me of an interesting topic. Don’t get me wrong, I think the topic was interesting, the idea of taking the government from analog to digital is something I very much support. There’s an organization that I’m a big fan of called Code for America whose goal is to improve currently existing government programs and bring them up to the standards held by most design professionals in the digital age. While VSFS exists in a similar vein, it differs in that it’s unpaid and I’m not entirely sure whether or not it’s held to the same standards that Code for America is.

One final note on the talk/program, I’m not sure how open source it actually is. I don’t know if I heard correctly, but I believe the speaker said that only about 40 of the 500 or so projects used open source software in some way. That number is apparently growing, and I’m glad to see that open source is starting to make more of a splash in the federal government, but I really don’t know if I agree with this as FOSS talk material. However, the fact that it’s not a very open source focused discussion I think makes the FOSS community at RIT the perfect group to show it to. As I said, the talk was more of an attempt to get free labour for these projects. If FOSS students get involved with this program, I imagine they are much more likely to try and push for open sourcing the projects they end up working on.

All in all, the talk was interesting to listen to, and I’m glad that a program like this exists to update the government, lord knows it’s needed. If anyone should join this program, I think that FOSS oriented coders and designers would be perfect. The government would do well to take stronger approach to open source software, and I know the FOSS community can help.