Can Community-Source Get Apps Built In A Recession?

“A lot of people were asking us to help them build community development strategies,” Cohen said. “And we spun out of OSDL to focus on business-to-business development.”

Describing the company, Gartner’s Prentice said, “An amalgam of technical, project management and open-source skills sets, CSI’s objective is to act as a bonding agent between organisations that share common business challenges – usually within a single industry.”

Added Prentice: “What CSI does is to broker a relationship between the affected organisations, not including vendors, with the intent of project managing a coordinated development effort between them. This reduces the costs of bespoke development from each participating member by distributing it amongst them.”

However, the real impact of CSI’s efforts lies in the fact that CSI manages the process of covering all the resulting work under an open-source license agreement, Prentice said. This is a key point not lost on Cohen, who tapped Eben Moglen, a law professor at Columbia University and founder of the Software Freedom Law Centre, as an adviser to CSI, particularly on issues of licensing.

Meanwhile, CSI has helped to introduce community-source development into various industries, including the financial services market, health care, energy and utilities, and government, Cohen said.

Demonstrating the capabilities of the collaborative model in the area of public health, CSI built TriSano, which is an open-source, citizen-focused surveillance and outbreak management system for infectious disease, environmental hazards and bioterrorism attacks. The system enables local, state and federal entities to gather information through interactions with citizens and helps public health officials better serve citizens, according to CSI officials.

To create TriSano, CSI launched a collaborative project with subject matter experts such as doctors, nurses, epidemiologists and others working together with the company’s program manager and development experts to create a next-generation disease surveillance and outbreak management application.

“TriSano addresses an urgent need of public health departments at the local, state and federal levels to fight the spread of infectious disease,” said Dr. Robert Rolfs, MD, an epidemiologist with the Utah Department of Health. “By hosting the TriSano open-source project, the Collaborative Software Initiative is building an open-source community that has a shared interest in improving citizens’ health by collecting and managing data to better address infectious disease outbreaks and meet CDC [Centres for Disease Control and Prevention] compliance requirements.”

Kelly Usselman, the TriSano public health community manager, said, “In current economic times, the ability to collaborate and share can be of great value to those that participate.”

In an effort to share the costs of software development and decrease overall risk, state agencies are beginning to reach out beyond their borders to join with their counterparts in other states, according to Rick Howard, CIO of the Oregon Department of Human Services.