Next-level Community Building with HAX

Open source projects thrive when communities grow around them—but building a healthy contributor pipeline is one of the hardest challenges any project faces. At Penn State University, Bryan Ollendyke, lead of the HAX The Web project, has developed a uniquely effective model that blends teaching, mentorship, student clubs, and funded research into a sustainable ecosystem of participation.

In this conversation with Apereo Board Chair Joshua Wilson, Bryan discusses how HAX is redefining web publishing, cultivating new contributors through authentic learning experiences, and exploring the next frontier of open tools—from portable web formats to AI-assisted content creation. Their discussion offers a compelling look at what’s possible when open source values are embedded directly into education and community life.

What is the HAX The Web project?

Bryan Ollendyke: HAX addresses a fundamental question: how do we make resources on the Internet? Right now, if you and I want to collaborate on a document, we go to Google Docs. But there's no equivalent "fixed mental model" for creating websites. We're forced into corporate solutions—Wix, Squarespace, WordPress, whatever—and these tools don't play nice with each other. Most people just want a 5-10 page site that expresses their vision and sits there, but in the modern landscape, that costs $20 a month, and your service doesn't work with my service.

We're trying to create a ubiquitous file format approach to websites—something portable that people can build locally and deploy to very cheap, if not free, hosting services. Everything in HAX is built on web standards, and everything you save is effectively static. Whether it's for OER, a pizza stand that needs a website, or faculty members who need to get their voice on the Internet quickly, we want people to have a more permanent, collaborative way to share information that isn't locked up in siloed solutions. You can take someone else's HAX site and remix it easily. That's the goal.

How does HAX grow its open source contributor community using your web development class, the HAX student club, and internships at the HAX Lab you founded?

Bryan Ollendyke: It's a three-legged stool that creates this really nice feedback loop. I teach a 200-level web programming class where students learn HTML, CSS, and JavaScript—the requirements of the course. HAX runs in the background as the tooling we use. The class isn't specifically about HAX, but it uses HAX as the staging ground. Students learn vanilla web components, thinking in terms of blocks, and they publish their work to static hosting. Around week eight, students realize, "Oh, this is what you do for a living." At that point, some of them get interested and want to do more.

That's where the HAX Club comes in. It meets every Monday, and students can participate for course credit or just show up. We typically have students working on two tracks. Some are installing the CLI, creating sites, and doing mini UX studies—they're getting into our issue queues, finding bugs, giving us feedback on what works and what doesn't. Others are actually working on the club website itself, building their own promotional home while learning component-based development by doing. They're learning by doing real work, and we're dogfooding our own tools while promoting what the organization does. 

Then the best students get internships through HAX Lab, where they're actually contributing to building the platform. For example, we didn't have a CLI (command line interface) two years ago—one of my students, Winston, took it to the nth degree, and now it's the basis of the course. He teaches other people how to use it in the club, they contribute bugs, and the spiral keeps spinning outward. I'm getting contributors who turn into interns, and when grants come in, there's this obvious batch of people who understand the technology and can be funded for student work.

Describe some of your recent wins securing cross-institutional funding to solve problems in education using HAX.

Bryan Ollendyke: We've landed several small internal grants recently from different colleges at Penn State, which is significant because it shows cross-institutional collaboration—not just our unit giving us money. One that I'm really excited about is a portfolio management project with two other colleges. Students need to create portfolios that faculty assess to ensure they've completed program requirements, but it becomes a technology quagmire. Where does the portfolio live? What format is it in? Usually, you just collect PDFs in some portfolio management tool, check the boxes, and the output isn't something the student can actually take to job interviews. It becomes this childish exercise instead of a real portfolio projected to the world.

With HAX and some additional functionality coming in the next release, students could stamp out a graduate portfolio—basically a HAX theme with all the pages, stub content, and locked-down functionality to make it more cookie-cutter. Because everybody's portfolio would be effectively the same structure, it makes it much easier for faculty to assess completion of requirements. The student walks away with an actual web-ready portfolio they can use and edit going forward. We're positioning HAX not as the main focus, but as this ubiquitous base layer that solves real educational problems. It's baby steps toward solving bigger problems, but these grants show that other colleges see HAX as a foundation they can build on.

Describe your recent work that blends HAX and AI agents.

Bryan Ollendyke: The reason our CLI is so important is because we've been training agents how to use HAX. Instead of training an agent to use the front-end buttons, there's a CLI command for everything—adding pages, creating content, all of it. My colleague, and HAX Lab co-founder, Dr. Dave Fusco, has been working on a project that connects to the Canvas API and pulls course data so faculty can assess how ready their courses are for the age of AI. Specifically, can these assignments be easily faked? Are they well aligned with the learning objectives? Do they have enough criteria that someone can't just copy the directions into an LLM and get a complete answer?

The system analyzes assignments and then uses HAX commands to create a site and populate it with recommendations—here's what your assignment was, here's what you could do to make it more AI-ready, and actually assess skill. The key difference is that what the agent stamps out is what you could have generated by running hundreds of commands yourself. It's not some gobbledygook blob—it's in a web-ready format you can edit. You could take what the agent generated, go to week six, assignment three, hit edit, and make your changes. Or you could look at it, say "that's a neat exercise," and delete it. We're forming this ubiquitous base layer, and everything else is just sprinkled on top. It's a better positioning for where we fit in the web stack.

Conclusions

HAX’s trajectory illustrates what can happen when open source innovation, student engagement, and institutional partnerships reinforce one another. Bryan’s model shows that meaningful contribution doesn’t begin with large code commits—it starts with curiosity, hands-on exploration, and a supportive community that grows talent over time.

If you’re interested in contributing, collaborating, or simply learning more, visit hax.psu.edu for links to documentation, the issue queue, and the HAX Discord community—all great entry points for getting involved. As Bryan notes, the project is always looking for testers, feedback, and partners who want to help shape the future of open web tooling.

Getting Involved

Interested in HAX? Visit hax.psu.edu for links to the project's issue queue, documentation at haxtheweb.org, and information about joining the HAX Discord community https://bit.ly/hax-discord. The project welcomes users who can test the platform, submit issues, and provide feedback, or collaborate on grants and student engagement approaches.

The interview has been edited for clarity and length.