Post on 05-Dec-2014
description
Open Source as an Instrument of Public Policy
Brian BehlendorfUS Dept of Health and Human Services (Advisor, Contractor)
Board Member: CollabNet, Mozilla, BenetechCo-Founder: Apache Software Foundation
What Open Source Software Development Really Taught Us:
● How to make consensus decisions while maintaining pace
● How to effectively re-use prior work● Peer ownership and stewardship● A reinforcing of open standards, and vice-versa● A connection to reality - code used in
production serves a grounding purpose to the work being done.
● “Usage is like oxygen for applications” - Matt Mullenweg
Why drive CONNECT as an Open Source community?
• Accelerate adoption of the NHIN standards across the healthcare industry, beyond the Federal sector.
• Improve quality through transparency.● “To a sufficient number of eyeballs, all bugs are
shallow." - E. Raymond
• Accelerate features on the development roadmap.• Provide a "diagonal" learning curve for adopters
● Make it easy to do the simple things, and possible to do everything else without hand-holding.
• Ensure the best use of current technologies and design practices in CONNECT.
What's the approach?
• Encourage and facilitate bug reports, feature requests, ideas, and code contributions.
• Encourage questions from new participants to build a database of ad-hoc knowlege about the platform.
• Promote the emerging commercial ecosystem around CONNECT through the vendor directory and success stories.
• Promoting major contributors to “committers”, who are peers to the contracted developers.
What Tools Do We Use To Do That?• Public development artifacts in:
● Subversion (for public code versioning)● A public bug database● A Wiki (for all development documentation, whiteboarding of
proposals, and all other collaborative document work)
• Public and inclusive development processes: ● Discussion forums● Ability to “subscribe” to commits, new/changed bugs or issues,
build reports, etc.
• Visibility into the sprints and CCB meetings via the wiki, conference calls, and more
• Public hack- code-a-thons
• Vendor Involvement
The NHIN Direct Project
● Focused on directed, secure health messaging● Project has been 100% public since inception● After much discussion and research, a simple
approach: SMTP, DNS, S/MIME, Certificate Authorities
● From use cases in April to v1.0 Reference Implementations in November
● 200+ participating organizations & individuals● 5 pilots about to launch.
Government engagement of the public in co-developing solutions requires:
● A focus on specific outcomes, building something rather than just polling
● Transparency from day one in processes and assets
● Recognition of participant motivations
● Facilitation by third parties or the participants themselves, humbling the brand of government
● Expectations of perpetuity; but also an eventual hand-off to an NGO
From Open Source software communities, we get:
● Ways to make consensus decisions while maintaining pace
● Ways to effectively re-use prior work
● Peer ownership and stewardship
● Reinforcing of open standards, and vice-versa
● A connection to real, production-environment experiences