Collaborating for the Good of Public Health: Developing Open Source Software to Accelerate Innovation

Community sourcing is the act of taking a task traditionally performed by a specific member of the group, or consultant, and exposing it to a controlled, generally large group of like-minded people in the form of an open call.  These subject matter experts identify problems, and program managers and developers solve the problem by forming a community, establishing a vision, identifying the key features and priorities needed for the application, committing to meet regularly to lend their expertise to guide the project and to provide feedback. The benefits of the collaboration include:

·         Problems can be explored at comparatively little cost, and often very quickly.

·         The community can tap a wider range of talent than is present in any one organization.

·         Participants get early adopter advantage while sharing the cost and the reward.

The most flexible and appropriate technology for collaboration is an open technology. Open technology embraces the community approach to attain its objectives. 

Collaborative development, or community sourcing, is a natural fit for public health organizations looking for solutions that will meet common requirements. Together, they can lower their development costs, mitigate risk and help to create de facto standards.

An example of community sourcing with open technology is the TriSano™ project, a collaborative partnership between the state and counties of Utah and Collaborative Software Initiative.  CSI TriSano™ is a citizen-centric surveillance and outbreak management system for infectious disease, environmental hazards, and bioterrorism attacks.  In this case, the subject matter experts were epidemiologists, doctors, nurses, and others.  It is currently in production throughout the State of Utah.

This presentation will discuss community sourcing and open software development and how these technologies were implemented to successfully architect, develop and deploy CSI TriSano™ in Utah.