SaMoLo in Government Open Source ProjectsLessons from the CONNECT project

A Nation’s Call to Action

“We’ll be on our way to computerizing all of America’s

medical records, which won’t just eliminate inefficiencies,

save billions of dollars and create tens of thousands of jobs

– but will save lives by reducing deadly medical errors.”

– President Barack Obama, February 4, 2009

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What is CONNECT?

CONNECT is a software solution that supports health information exchange.

CONNECT uses Nationwide Health Information Network standards and governance to ensure HIEs interoperate with other current and future exchanges.

CONNECT can be used to:• Set up a health information exchange

within an organization.

• Tie a health information exchange into other HIEs including the Exchange.

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Federal Health ArchitectureCollaborative Mindset Seeded CONNECT

FHA ensures Federal participation in ONC-led initiatives

• E-gov initiative managed by ONC within HHS

• 20+ federal agencies participate in FHA

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CONNECT Open Source Project Since (Date)

CONNECT was “released as open source code” to keep costs low and to

promote widespread adoption to encourage health information exchange.

FHA enabled cross-agency collaboration,

aggregate + coordinated benefits

Use of open source tools accelerated

development

Open source community contributed to

development

CONNECT is in the midst of transitioning to

a fully open-source community-driven project.

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Spectrum of Government Open Source Projects

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Project Uses Open

Source Components

Open Source

License

Source Code

“Published”

Source Code

Hosted/Available

Government-Sponsored

Open Source Project

Open Source

Project that

Originated in

the Government

SaMoLo

Technique used in Agile software projects to guide project or sprint retrospective

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“Same As”

“More Of”

“Less Of”

Sa

Mo

Lo

SaMoLo – Same As

• Open and broad collaboration

• Honesty

• Leveraging common needs

• Openly expose the release planning

• … and requirements …. and the process

• Hybrid balance between funding and non-funding partner requirements!!

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SaMoLo – More Of

Up-front investment

- Coding standards!!

- Flexible infrastructure

- Structured, defined, and understood internal and external communication plans

- Definition of roles and governance

Sustained investment in community

- Dedicated technical resources to outreach and nurturing of the community (tricky labor category?)

Acknowledgment that you – your office, your program, and your contract support – are going to REALLY expose yourselves – process, quality, risks, issues, results

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SaMoLo – More Of

Long-term planning – discuss the exit strategy early. And know that it will change.

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SaMoLo – Less Of

Caveat: These did not occur with FHA/CONNECT, but in general are behaviors that need to be set aside when you’re running an open source project

Fear

Rigidity

Tolerance of dissention/posturing among

collaborating contractor teams – the only focus should

be support the mission, on the project faces risk

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Upcoming Community Events

June 28, 2012 (11am)

Webinar on GitHub

July 2, 2012 (1pm)

Next sprint planning meeting

August 1, 2012CONNECT Release 3.3.1

August, 2012

CONNECT Code-a-Thon

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• www.connectopensource.org

• https://github.com/CONNECT-Solution/CONNECT

• mailto:connect@hhs.gov

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