CIC

This is the second in a short series of posts where I’m looking at the announcements from NHS England / HSCIC in support of open source solutions for NHS organisations. In this post I’m looking at the role of governance and community around open source projects. Following the Safer Hospitals, Safer Wards Technology Fund announced in June of this year, Gary McAllister posted a comment piece which neatly summarises key criteria of open source which I paraphrase here: The code should be freely available online, well-documented and accessible. It should be evident from the code repository that regular commits are made to the project from multiple sources, demonstrating that the code-base is active. The licensing for the code should utilise an “Open” license. Examples of licenses which meet the Open Source Initiative definition of open source can be seen here. A project should have corporate investment and a viable service provider clearly backing the product. This may sound counter intuitive but in order for an Open solution to be viable long-term it needs backing from a corporate entity. Without corporate backing the solution is “unsupported” and there is little evidence to ensure continued development. You could end up with a stale loaf of bread. ...

Presented to the HANDI Health Apps conference at EHILive 2013 and continuing my series of provocative and disruptive anti-presentations here I talk about approaches to developing, distributing and deploying software solutions in social systems. If you think this is an extended rant on the virtues of opensource, think again. Drawing on Mauss, Dawkins, Benkler, Chesbrough and others here I discuss how NHS organisations and software developers and vendors can each have cake and eat it....