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Advice for an Open Source Development Grant?
IgD asks: "My colleagues and I are developing an open source medical records system. A senior supervisor approached us and let us know a third party is offering a decent amount of money in the form of a grant for any legitimate medical research project. We were all but promised the money if we could come up with a proposal. Has anyone in the Slashdot community received a grant for open source software development? Are there any good examples of such a grant available? How could one measure the results of open source development for publication?"
Is your goal ge get the job done, or to open source your code, or to get money? Imho they are very different goals.
Less is more !
Refer to other medical research proposals. I'm assuming that you're not trying to get this grant on the sole basis of this being open source, right? The open v/s closed source nature of your project should be pretty irrelevant to your research proposal.
Mmmm.. Donuts
>How could one measure the results of open source >development for publication?"
.. Your reseach being opensource has no impact either positive or negative on the reviewers mind. Keep in mind the goals and make sure the job is well done .. Just because it is open source does not mean the results can be mediocre .. some of the best reseach is open source.
The Same way one measures other research results
May I ask you why you decided to open source it?
Unfortunetly despite of what Eric writes in "The Cathedral and the Baazar" Free Software developers are still most likely to recieve their reward in fame not $$. It may feel good but the Free Software community has so far failed to work out a way to consistently financially reward the actual developers (not hardware compnaies who bundle Linux with their servers!). Even if your project become popular all you'll get from users is bitching and moaning not meaningful bug reports. Just watch the burnout suffered by Fink, MPlayer and Router floppy authors.
US-UK-Israel: The real Axis of Evil
If you want to make an open sourced system just for the sake of it being open then you're going to have a hard time. I firmly believe that some things should be open sourced, but it's not always prudent to do so. Every situation is different and open source isn't always the answer. Companies need to make money, even the open source friendly companies release software closed source.
If you can get grant money based on the finished product then open source is a good idea, but if you need to provide a product that will be sold, i think companies will be a little more frugal handing you money to create something open.
Then, talk about the benefits of an open source application, and talk about it's longevity and low cost of future manipulation. But only briefly, don't get too technical on them. Instead, attack the human aspect. Do some research and find out what the doctors and medical staffers themselves really hate, not their bosses/directors.
Why use open source as a medical record system? Why use the open source model? As one of the replying pundits put it "move out of mom's house and get a real job".
... actually the SCO model for those of you who remember SCO in its heyday before barritry became popular ... a place to find some security. More important is that from a physician standpoint what could be better than CQI, continuous quality improvement. The open source channel makes that not only possible, but nearly mandatory.
The reason for using open source software is that it is indeed a collaborative effort. For those of you that think that this is one setup shopping, its time to look at the serious projects that have made some inroads and continue to develop.
The business model for open source, indeed for those of us who remember a time before the internet (yes there WAS that time), when software started to be packaged with machines. Why, one might ask should one pay for software when it comes for free? Today $450 but tomrrow it's packaged. For those of us who watched carefully we knew that the real money to be made in the world of software would be in support and support applications. To a certain extent those who continue with proprietary and exculsionary sorts of software may well find themselves moved over because of freely available and very robust software.
The advance of linux and linux clones is such an example of the incursion of open source software. Free? Hardly. Freely available? Always.
From a standpoint of software design and development, the open source model gives those of us who wish not to be constantly hit up for nickles and dimes
So, those of you who have regarded the only path to enlightenment that of the Gates family or Big Blue, look again at some of the companies doing open source development.
As for the question about grant seeking; The FreeMED Software Foundation is seeking grants to employ coders and others to better the software. Since the Foundation is a non profit, seeking the development, promulgation and distribution of opensource software, people who are motivated to see better software development can contribute to the making of better software. In a way, donated dollars dictate direction.
There is much more about the open source movement and the intellectual freedoms that such development permits. Check them out. Check out the FreeMED Software Foundation (www.freemedsoftware.com) or the open source news list at LinuxMedNews (www.linnuxmednews.org).
Freely Submitted:
Irving J. Buchbinder aka DrGnu
FreeMED Software Foundation
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I should also have stated that I believe there is a significant need for medical records management software in the open source community and if you were to perform a little market research on medical records software, you would find the field is a mess of competing programs and standards, and you would not believe how much money is made by businesses that have half assed solutions to the problem. The cost to individual medical practices and hospitals is considerable and many companies do not have any real clue of how to properly implement this code. Things are complicated by numerous proprietary databases and lots of new HIPAA legislation that makes interconnectivity a real nightmare.
I've often thought that a good open source team of about thirty individuals including a half dozen subject matter experts, a couple good technical writers and half a dozen programmers could kick some serious butt in this market, establish an inter-operative database standard, either run it platform independent, or take advantage of some pretty powerful, yet inexpensive software like Web Objects and dominate the market within two years. Of course this third party you are talking about is probably interested in such a proposal, thus the offer. It's pretty amazing actually how many folks are wading around aimlessly in this market. Big players like GE, Siemens, IBM etc... are without any direction or focus on this problem and the market payoff could be relatively big if you properly market this to select members of government who are absolutely desperate to reduce the cost of medicine.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
BTW: Communism is where the government evenly distributes wealth, not when alot of people work together on a project. Might be helpful if you have to go through a high-school history course again ;)
Not that I want to know, but the goals and interests of the funding agency should be reflected in your proposal. For example, if the funding agency is interested in third-world health, then play up the low cost of the software for impoverished/disadvantaged clinics. If the donor is a big pharma company, then play up how they could "give this away" to potential customers or use it in clinical research. If the third party is more interested in academic research, then show how the system can support data collection, double-blind studies, etc. I'm not sure that the "open source" angle will have much traction unless you can show that the open source process multiplies the impact of the donor's money.
The more you know who the donor is, the better your proposal will sound to them.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
There are people who are paid to write grants. They have experience writing the grants, in the form, and including the infomation, that is likely to get them approved. I would start looking for one at a local university. Perhaps one with a medical school. Instructors usually know a of a colleague who writes grants.
Isn't that what the "Paypal Donate" button is for (the one that never gets clicked...once) ?