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