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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?"
for someone with the time to do so, would be to make a portal with as much info on this subject, and links to sites that may be able to help you get started / funded for such a project. I'm sure the OSS community would appreciate a site with such information. Just a thought...
At one time, fairly recently, we wrote a grant proposal for the Soros foundation, which was running a special program to help "disadvantaged communities and citizens" in the New York City area. Our proposal was considered one the better ones they received, for it was to enable accessibility for the blind. However, they rejected it primarly because this was something that could also be useful to helping blind people outside of NYC as well! I kid you not!
There already is an open-source EMR (gnumed.org), but no doctors are using them, because the switchover is just too hard. My dad's a doctor, and he was promiced a free EMR, just pay for the hardware. In fact, it was the FIRST EMR ever made, but he would have to hire extra people to load the rooms of files he had into the computer. It was just too hard.
My guess would be that writing this grant would be like writing any other grant. The idea is to propose an idea, outline your thesis (in this case, why you are making a case for this software and why open source), talk about the background of this project, why it is important what the implications are if this were to succeed and how you plan on going about completing this project. Outline the costs and give a timeline, clearly state your goals and wrap it up.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
I've received sponsorship money from some pretty big companies for the development (or augmentation) of an open-source project I wrote.
Now, this wasn't a "here is some money, go write something useful" type of sponsorship, but more along the lines of "we like your work but need a certain feature added. Here is the money, add the feature".
It probably doesn't help you though, since they (the money) came to me...
Ron Gage - Westland, MI
How could one measure the results of open source development for publication?
You haven't been in academia long -- the answer is you make up the results like everyone else!
But seriously, I'm not sure what is unusual about this situation. You apply for the grant, saying you want to research and develop XYZ system. At the end of the time period for the grant, you'll have to show that something happened, whether it is getting 1,000 developers working on it (this is good because you can clam the investment was matched 1,000 times in donations!) or having 12 private clinics and 2 hospital systems evaluating it and participating in system testing.
Whatever, you make up everything you can think of to measure (lines of code, contributors, patients tracked, data points, countries involved, languages ported to, web site hits, days of uptime, number of compatible legacy systems), keep track of it all, and at the end of the grant you write a paper saying how fantastic all the good stuff was, or why the whole thing failed and should never be attempted again.
If you really look into currently published stuff, you'll see that 98% of it is just proving and restating the obvious in a way that people can reference for future publications, so that they don't have to waste time on the obvious when the 2% of real research takes place.
I do applaud you and encourage you (and anyone else with the stomach for grant-writing) to pursue it, you'd be surprised how easy money is to get for useful projects if you can just keep up on the paperwork and wait months and months for every step to happen.
Get a half-dozen ongoing grants and you can basically have a small company that does pure non-profit open-source development year-round (and one full-time MBA to manage the grants!).
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Now we have some funds to further the distribution. I will tell this guy it DOES pay to make Open Source Software.
This is a test. This is a test of the emergency sig system. This has been only a test.
I don't know if anyone could even use it. Under HIPAA law you have to have a business associate's agreement with all vendors, and ALL vendors must supply support for the products or they aren't compliant. That's not even about the actual security or code flow of the program, but the whole project itself.
I do HIPAA audits, and I couldn't give them a a good rating on the risk analysis if they used it, because of that. No support==non-compliant. I could suggest they buy it from your company if your selling it, I don't see it being used by an IT staff somewhere without a vendor.
Maybe we DID take the blue pill. You wouldn't remember anyway.
You certainly sound like you're at one, or a teaching hospital. Most universities (& hospitals) have research offices to help professors & other researchers apply for and get grants. Many of them are quite good at it. Why?
Most US (& Canadian) universities make a pile of money by charging "overhead" on grants. This is supposed to cover the costs of physical plant, the library usage related to research, etc. etc.
There is no relation between the costs of overhead and the value of the services provided. Despite millions being collected from my Prof's research grants in overhead, it takes forever to get light bulbs fixed. We started referring to metaphysical plant.
My advice to you (I have received several grants and fellowships) is to really be tight on the proposal. If the grant application asks you to write it in blood, write it in blood. I have also been on committees that review grant proposals. We would kick proposals, unread, for not having the correct format on the TITLE PAGE! When I complained that this was a minor thing, the committee chair looked over her glasses and said, "If it isn't perfect, then it doesn't deserve our consideration or our money." Be tight. That is my advice.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
that this shouldn't be open source? Do you not remember what RMS has said about proprietary software?
A non-free program is a predatory social system that keeps people in a state of domination and division, and uses the spoils to dominate more. It may seem like a profitable option to become one of the emperor's lieutenants, but ultimately the ethical thing to do is to resist the system and put an end to it.
The last thing we need is to have a predatory social system injected into our medical profession. Hospitals and other entities should collaborate to create software to be used by all; it would be the inexpensive, ethical thing to do.
PS I predict most of the negative responses to this post will be proprietary software developers suffering cognative dissonance, who feel the need to write knee-jerk responses to anybody suggesting even for a millisecond that non-free software is somehow wrong.
In creating medical software you have to use code sets. They are somewhat modular, but I don't know how modular they are to be able to change them between countries. That would be up to the writers, and is probably something they really need to look into. If they can make the codesets modular, then that would help in more world-wide acceptance.
I think the same about the funding. I really was commenting on the whole "open source" of it.
It won't have the "rouge install" factor behind it, because it can't. You can't use it without some type of vendor support, or at least where PHI is concerned.
If it violated the service contract, someone could end up in jail.
Maybe we DID take the blue pill. You wouldn't remember anyway.
One example I'm familiar with is the NIH Office on Neuroinformatics (no link provided, I don't want to Slashdot my funding agency!) supports the development of software for things like brain imaging and databasing. Their funded projects include lots of open source and GPLed projects, some directed by Slashdot readers (well, at least one). I don't know of any place where you can find successful applications, but you can at least browse some project descriptions.
This is just one example, I'm sure there are many others even just at the NIH (incl. at the new NIBIB).
There is already FreeMed (www.freemed.org). Check them out. You might join forces. They are very nice people and need all the help they can get.
Medical records NEED to be open source precisely because of the nature of the business of keeping medical records. No one wants to share. I dont care if you can't read mine. Without an industry push possibly backed by big players the medical records will remain on islands, lost, inefficient and ineffective.
my other sig sucks less