Week 5 blog post

_posts/2024-02-25-week05.md

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+layout: post
+title: "Week 5: Social Good Projects"
+---
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+## Humanitarian Project Discussion
+
+For this week's class discussion on social good/humanitarian projects, I watched the videos on open source healthcare. It was definitely enlightening to hear about ways that open source projects can help people in such tangible and important ways. The diabetes video in particular was really interesting to me, because I feel like I'm always hearing stories, especially in America, about people who can't get access to insulin because it costs too much, and it's always been outrageous to me that this life-saving, necessary medication is so inaccessible to people, so I was happy to learn about an open source project that focuses on making and distributing affordable insulin to people. I'm interested in keeping tabs on this project and I hope it's able to achieve its goal soon for the sake of the people who need it.
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+All the different humanitarian projects covered in class discussion were great to learn about, and I think it would be nice to try to contribute to some of them for this class. The iNaturalist project discussed in class was particularly interesting to me, and although I don't think I'm knowledgeable enough to contribute to it, I think it's an app that I might use in the future, as it seems really useful for identifying plants and animals I might find around me. 
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+I think trying to help others should be the goal of open source in general, since it's all about access, and really it should be the goal of coding in general. I was surprised it ranked so low in this class's career goals, but I also understand that it can feel really difficult to see code on a screen as something that can help people tangibly in real life, and many computer science jobs feel like they're not really oriented towards helping people. It's definitely a goal for me, but sometimes it feels unrealistic in a profit-driven society, so at least contributing to open source projects can help me achieve that.
+
+## Contributions
+
+So far my [contributions](https://ossd-s24.github.io/leannelu-weekly/contributions/) have been pretty small. My first contribution was to OpenStreetMaps, adding and updating points in NYC that I'm familiar with as well as in my hometown. My second contribution was to the course website, fixing an issue with a broken image for one of the listed books. My third contribution was a Wikipedia edit, adding an internal link to another Wikipedia page in an article for Ryan Bergara. 
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+These have all been fairly low-stakes edits, since I still find myself nervous to contribute to anything bigger and risk messing something up, so it's hard to choose one I'm proudest of. I guess for now I'm proudest of my OpenStreetMap contribution, which probably took the longest. I went through the tutorial carefully, and then while visiting home one weekend I double checked that stores were still where I remembered them before editing. I added/updated 17 points in total based on my own local knowledge, and also cross-checking addresses and hours on Google Maps.
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+I'm also happy to have made a contribution to the course website. The pull request hasn't been merged yet, and it was a pretty small fix, but it was my first real contribution to an open source Github project besides my group's browser extension project, so it was definitely helpful for me to understand the process better. I also had to dig through the files a little to find exactly where to make the fix, and got to familiarize myself more with the website's files that way.
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+It's been challenging to find things to contribute to that don't feel overwhelming just to start. I'm not sure where to look for open source projects where I can make small, low-stakes contributions like the ones I've done so far beyond the projects that have been recommended in class.