This morning Kate Somers (IntraHealth Senior Program Development Team Leader) and I went to a class at the UNC School of Law. The class is a contracts law class which is taught by a close friend. What Kate talked about was a recent contract she wrote for a project which we will be announcing shortly. I was there because the project in question will deal very directly with open source technologies and the professor thought it important to explain the work as well as the contract.
The class went very well as it dealt fairly evenly with both our planned initiative, and the details of the contract. I think the point of having us there was both to capture the attention of those students who are very interested in contract law and to show those who might not have as big an interest in the required class how powerful a tool a good contract can be. I would imagine that in the course of their regular classwork these students don’t come across contracts that are quite like the ones Kate has to draw up dealing with an organization like IntraHealth, and the work we do with open source technologies.
For me it was great to note the interest the students had in the work we are doing here at IntraHealth, and more specifically in the Informatics group. Of course, any student is eager to take the opportunity to discuss things outside of those which are assigned, still there were some great questions about our work and the project in question.
I have not been in a college classroom since my own days in college which are too far back now for me to want to mention. Nonetheless, when I was in college there were no such things as laptops. Now, the group of folks staring at the front of the classroom are doing so just over the tops of their laptop screens. In trying to explain why an organization like IntraHealth is working within open source licensing I pointed out that throughout that classroom I could see many Apple computers, some Dells, and a few HP’s. I assumed that most of the non-Apple computers were running Windows. I’m not entirely sure how many people are in that class but perhaps it was around 40 people. If we were to very conservatively assume that the license fee for each machine (just for the operating system) was $200 that would be $8000 worth of operating systems in that room alone. When we go into relatively poor countries, and into relatively poor Ministries of Health and attempt to put in systems with expensive per-seat license fees it typically cannot work. Add to that the fact that specialized systems usually have license fees that dwarf those of operating systems and you can see the problem. All this before we even get to upgrade-fees and the cost of customizing a system to suit the users specific needs.
Of course there are many more benefits to us using open source technologies but in many ways it all comes back to this economic question. For most of us, I think it is safe to say that to help health care workers do their work more efficiently so that they can help more people, we really aren’t concerned whether the tools are open source or proprietary - as long as we are helping them. However, there is an organic path with the finances and with the ownership model that very directly leads us to use and promote open source for this work. When we consider long-term sustainability on top of that, to me, we again come back to open source due to its usual adherence to standards as well as the complete and open access and ownership of the code.
Posted by
David Mason on 3/25/2008 • Tags: Open Source, Resources, Sustainability
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I admit it: I have a love-hate relationship with my cell phone.
I don’t like phones in general, but I consider my cell phone to be more necessary than other phones. It has helped me out in some sticky situations, like when I had a flat tire or needed advice on a difficult buying decision while at the mall. But I don’t like the thought of other people being able to find me no matter where I am, so I am stingy with giving out my cell phone number. And I am rather passive-agressive toward my cell phone, often leaving it uncharged until it starts that annoying “low battery” beeping, usually at 2 a.m.
Still, I must be alone in disliking my cell phone, because everywhere I look, people are talking on them. Cell phones aren’t just popular here in the U.S. They are becoming ubiquitous all over the world. Worldwide there are over 2.7 billion mobile phone users, far surpassing Internet users, TV watchers or even car drivers. In the developing world, especially, mobile phones are leapfrogging conventional wired technologies like landlines and Internet to become a primary communications and information resource.
Last week I was in a meeting with a co-worker who had just returned from a workshop the Capacity Project was hosting in Africa. He shared an interesting learning — that his African colleagues rarely read email as part of their daily work. (What a shock that is to those of us working in an email-addicted culture!) Rather, they would prefer to be notified via an SMS (text message) on their cell phones when an important email message was waiting for them because they were much more likely to check their cell phone messages than their email. Reading the text message would prompt them to go read their email. (Why not skip the middle man and send the email straight to their phone?)
In fact, the developing world is way ahead of us in finding creative ways to use text messaging and mobile phone applications. Here, we still largely use our cell phones to talk. In the developing world, cell phones are used to look for jobs, check daily prices for crops, and get timely health information and services, among many other applications.
In the U.S., we are so used to our daily routine of email and web surfing that we forget that the rest of the world is different. We put content or services on a website, point people to the URL and expect them to just go. We expect our audience to get updates via “pull” methods like RSS feeds and email lists that they subscribe to themselves. But everything comes back to the Web link.
Our audience and clients in the developing world don’t have reliable access to the Internet, and they aren’t in the habit of checking these resources daily or using them as primary sources of information. What they do have is a cell phone in their pocket. The technology already exists for converting email messages and website updates to text messages and vice versa. But those of us who are providing the content have to remember that it’s a mobile world and make our content available in multiple formats, including SMS.
This raises some questions and challenges, of course. Receiving text messages costs money, so any messages we send have to be timely and critical to have value. Text messages have to be short and to the point, which changes the way we write content as well as how we deliver it. Does that mean we should start delivering messages a la Twitter, but with meaning? How do we promote two-way conversation, and more importantly, interactivity — with web-based applications, like iHRIS, for instance — given the constraints of the cell phone? How do we reach people who may use multiple phones or change phones frequently?
MobileActive.org may be a resource that can help. Their mission is to help nonprofits use mobile technology more effectively in their development efforts. Their website provides useful news about mobile technology used in various initiatives, as well as international mobile usage statistics, including number of subscribers, cell phone costs and providers for each country. Another good resource is the Mobile Applications Database, a database of projects using mobile technology to make a difference.
Here we’re also planning to take our iHRIS software mobile and to build a mobile telecommunications-based community health information system as part of the Last Mile Initiative. Stay tuned for developments!
Looks like I’m going to have to learn how to love my cell phone…
Posted by
Shannon Turlington on 11/5/2007 • Tags: Cellphones, Development, ICT4d, Information Systems, Mobile Technology, NPtech, Resources, Telephony
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I’ve been involved with open source for many years now, both professionally and personally. In all my time involved I never saw much movement in health-related applications. Occasionally there would be some sort of records management application being created by a doctor somewhere who was tired of licensing fees, but that was it. In the last year or so that has changed. The amount of work currently going on to create open source health systems is quite impressive.
Our good friend Paul Jones who created and runs ibiblio from the University of North Carolina has even set up a wiki to help track all of the open source projects relating to public health. The list is quite impressive.
It’s easy to say that there is a bit of a movement going on.
Looking at it at face value it only makes sense: public health is all about raising the health of a community which in turn raises the health of a bigger community, and then the world. To build the necessary tools that make public health easier to implement, what better way than with a community? To reach the most people as possible with those tools, transparency and freedom must play a part. If the tools are hindered by intellectual property controls, then only the wealthy can play. That, to me, is not public health.
I must say that it’s good to be a part of this movement — one that has the potential to touch so many lives in such a positive way.
Posted by
David Mason on 10/3/2007 • Tags: FOSS, Open Source, Public Health, Resources
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