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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...
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.
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.
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.
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).