Want to know which professor 'seems a few French fries short of a happy meal?'   Well, there's an Internet Web site for you. —Los Angeles Times Article about the first OpenRatings site, Polyratings.com

Most people think of the Internet as a mind-boggling network of computers and technology. But the truth is, it's an unprecedented network of people, more specifically, students. Thousands of students just like you, who have already been where you want to go, or are following a path that you've already taken.

Those words appeared on a website in 1999, at the beginning of it all. Two students in a dorm at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo were trying to figure out which professor they wanted to take that quarter. And, like most students, they wanted professors that wanted to be in the class room... professors that genuinely cared about their students and wanted to teach them.

They of course, asked their friends, but none of their friends had taken the classes they needed to take. So an idea was born: why not use the Internet to facilitiate the communcation between students about the quality of an institution's professors?

The first version was perl/CGI driven, and used flat files for storing professor evaluations. Today, the Polyratings.com professor evaluation engine, given to the open source community as the OpenRatings professor evaluations engine, supports a fully database-driven architecture, with a (mostly) plugable user interface and advanced searching and sorting techniques... in short, just about everything you'd ever need to build your own professor evaluation site.

Building and implementing such software at Cal Poly has proven very interesting. As you might imagine, the university has not always taken kindly to our OpenRatings installation at Polyratings.com. In fact, the Vice-president of Technology at Cal Poly has tried to shutdown the site and demand content be removed on a number of occasions, while misrepresenting his position to the media when they came around asking questions (details on Polyratings.com if you'd like to see the dramatic story).

It was these kind of games, coupled with the fact that we felt it that the code was mature enough and it was time to share this awesome communications system with others that prompted us to release the code as open source.

If you can believe it, Cal Poly's overreaching intellectual property policy would claim that Cal Poly, not the original Polyratings.com team, owns the copyright to the source code that you're viewing. In order to ensure that any attempt to play this trump could would be effectively useless, we wanted to release the code to everyone... so every student, high schooler through graduate, can setup their own OpenRatings site, and hopefully positively impact their campus the way we've impacted ours.

OpenRatings is a unique open source project in that not only are we offering freedom in terms of free speech (the source code) and free beer (as in no exchange of money), but free speech as in... free speech. The open source model is helping to protect the rights of over 16,000 students who've posted over some 7,000 evaluations, and that's just at Cal Poly. Open source is defending not only the freedom of the collegiate programmers of the world, but the free speech rights of every student on every campus in America that wants to let other students know what they're in for.

The OpenRatings team recognizes that the power of the Internet lies in the students who populate it. If you can imagine a room full of people helping you make decisions on who to take for a class or what professor will be most helpful with your senior project, then you can imagine a place like OpenRatings. With a little help from us, all you need to do is start the revolution at your school...