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. ...
There have been several announcements from NHS England / HSCIC in support of open source solutions for NHS organisations. These announcements have spawned much discussion and debate - on EHI/HSJ/NHSHackday sites and at EHILive - which ranges in style and content from Chicken Licken to Richard Stallman.
In a short series of blogs I’m planning to post I’m going to look at these announcements and the reaction from a few different perspectives. In this post I’m looking at where the direction for such support from NHS England is coming from and what ‘support’ for open source solutions might actually mean.
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Some notes taken on observing people the other side of the pond dissecting a major Govt IT project to deliver a political objective.
Would this project have benefited from Opensorcery? If PPACA wasn’t communist enough! Writing in Bloomberg Businessweek, Paul Ford explains that the debacle known as healthcare.gov makes clear that it is time for government to change the way it delivers IT: embrace the open source approach to software development that has revolutionized the technology industry. Well, openness worked before for Obama e.g. with the IT spending dashboard (code here) but that was in the first years of the first term. You can do anything in that period of a presidency.
Looking at the Congressional hearing (which makes our PAC look rather tame on NPfIT) as reported by Grauniad two lessons stand out for me. One technical, the other political.
From a technical perspective the importance of proving an end-to-end test FIRST and not two weeks prior to a go-live is crucial. This is the approach we are taking with Wardware and the other projects we are working on. Can we pass a simple message through the components of the stack? No. Fix it. And now? Yes. Great! Build on and test for regressions.
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