[TOS] Question re. projects and courses related to social computational systems

[Mel Chua]

> 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