MONDAY, 4:00 – 4:20PMand TUESDAY, 5:00 – 5:30PM

Brian BehlendorfCONNECT Collaboration Advisor (Contractor)Federal Health Architecture, Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT

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The CONNECT Open Source Community's Role in Promoting Nationwide HIE

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Why drive CONNECT as an Open Source community?

• Accelerate adoption of the NHIN standards across industry, beyond the Federal sector

• Improve quality through transparency“To a sufficient number of eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." - E. Raymond

• Accelerate features on the development roadmap

• Provide a "diagonal" learning curve for adoptersMake it easy to do the simple things, and possible to do everything else without hand-holding

• Ensure the best use of current technologies and design practices in CONNECT

What's the approach?

• Encourage and facilitate bug reports, feature requests, ideas, and code contributions

• Encourage questions from new participants to build a database of ad-hoc knowledge about the platform

• Promote the emerging commercial ecosystem around CONNECT through the vendor directory and success stories

• Promoting major contributors to “committers”, who are peers to the contracted developers

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What Tools Do We Use To Do That?

• Public development artifacts in:– Subversion (for public code versioning)– Jira (the bug database)– A Wiki (for all development documentation, whiteboarding of proposals, and

all other collaborative document work)

• Public and inclusive development processes: – Discussion forums– Ability to “subscribe” to commits, new/changed issues in Jira, etc.

• Visibility into the development sprints and Configuration Control Board (CCB) meetings via the wiki, conference calls, and more

• Public Code-A-Thons! Two so far, next one in Miami Apr 28-29

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Contributions To Date

• Additional operating systems and application servers: Linux, JBoss, Axis, soon Websphere

• Much simpler to build and test now – community contributed to the move from EJBs to POJOs, and better build scripts

• Continuous-Integration build services to alert devs for broken check-ins

• Feedback on proposals by the dev team

• Two new “committers”: Jeff Schmidt and Keith Babo

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But More Work To Do:

• Adopt even more Apache development principles, a la– “If it's not online, it didn't happen”– Getting public +1 approvals for commits

• Introduce “Communities of Common Interest” - subgroups focused on specific topics, who work together on both code and specs to investigate

• Enable more modular side projects: collaboration around new adapters, the NHIN-Direct work, and other small apps that would sit on top of CONNECT

• Doing more to document the adoption of CONNECT and related open technologies for HIE

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Thank You

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The participation of any company or organization in the NHIN and CONNECT area within the HIMSS Interoperability

showcase does not represent an endorsement by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information

Technology, the Federal Health Architecture or the Department of Health and Human Services.