A GROUP of Filipino students from the University of the Philippines has developed an open source-based student elections system that recently won in an international competition, INQUIRER.net learned.

The University of the Philippines Linux Users' Group (UnPLUG), which developed the "Halalan Open Source Voting System," was named one of the winners in the Software Freedom Day 2006 competition.

Halalan won in the "Best plans for FOSS (free and open source software) deployment project on new server for community benefit" category. UnPLUG shared the spotlight with Ceres, a Disaster Prevention and Rapid Response Network system from Peru's Team Cultura Libre.

"We won in the community-based project category," said Prem Vilas Fortran Rara, member of UnPLUG and fifth year electrical engineering student, in a telephone interview.

"It was judged based on its impact on the community. In our case, the project was intended for the academic community," the student said.

The Halalan system was deployed last year for the elections of batch representatives at the Computer Science department of the University. About 500 students voted, and results were known within the day, Rara said.

For winning, the UnPLUG received an IBM System p5 510 Express Server worth $8800. IBM was one of the sponsors for the global SFD 2006 celebrations in cooperation with Software Freedom International, the group said in a statement.

Rara said that UnPLUG intends to push its open source-based student election system for the University-wide elections in 2008, which is also UP's centennial foundation year.

UnPLUG has about 30 members composed of computer science, electrical engineering, and library science students.

For the Halalan project, non-members have also contributed to the development of the system, Rara said.

He added that the group plans to push this system to other universities, and hopefully, to the Commission on Elections, which decided to delay full automation of elections this year.

Software Freedom Day is an annual worldwide celebration of the virtues of Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) and is a public education effort to encourage its use to the public.

US-based Software Day International established Software Freedom Day with various members from around the world. They will now celebrate Software Freedom Day every third Saturday of September starting 2006.