Designing Open Projects: Lessons From Internet Pioneers

abernard102@gmail.com 2012-06-28

Summary:

Use the link to access the full text report from the IBM Center for The Business of Government. The introduction reads as follows: “The growth of the Internet is amazing . In just 40 years, it has developed from four computers connected by telephone lines into a wired and wireless service connecting over a quarter of the people on the planet and beyond... McKinsey & Company calls the Internet ‘a significant and growing portion of global GDP . Indeed, if measured as a sector, Internet-related consumption and expenditure is now bigger than agriculture or energy .’ The vast tool set built on the Internet—from communications to analysis to data retrieval to music and video—has made us smarter, faster, more talented, and better connected . As we learn how to better use and keep improving these rich tools, we will get better at working together, managing projects, and solving problems in both government and the private sector. But being able to use the Internet is not the whole story . Easy to overlook is the fact that the Internet itself represents a very large, distributed, collaborative development project . It has the following characteristics: [1] No one owns or manages it [2] It can’t be turned off (at least not yet) [3] Much of its infrastructure is available for reuse for free, by anyone in the world [4] It is both public and private, global and local, commercial and cooperative [5] It evolves, grows, breaks, and is repaired without central coordination The Internet constitutes what can be called an open approach in two senses of the term. From a computing perspective, it is driven by public standards that support interoperability with a wide range of hardware and software products . From a systems perspective, it is flexible with permeable borders, continuously interacting with and gaining energy from its context... The Internet has spurred a great deal of creativity and innovation, reached considerable scale, and had a big impact on society—three things that government and nonprofit leaders strive for. Insights from the Internet’s pioneers can help us create and support open projects, defined as projects that: [1] Evolve, react, and innovate [2] • Engage large numbers of people in learning, teaching, and creating [3] Enable insights, solutions, and resources to both solve problems and help problems get solved... Internet-like open projects are now beginning to shape government and nonprofit efforts . One in particular is the Department of Health and Human Service’s Nationwide Health Information Network (NwHIN), what some call a ‘health internet.’ This project is creatively applying Internet lessons to address a set of particularly thorny health and health care information issues . The NwHIN experience provides a clear example of how lessons from the development of the Internet can help government and nonprofit managers approach their own complex problems. A case study of development of the NwHIN by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is presented to explore how these tips are now being used in a realworld program, and specifically how they may be applied to improve health care in the U .S . This report will describe the idea of open projects, provide a history of the Internet’s development, and offer a set of handy tips suggested by its development . These tips are intended to help government and nonprofit leaders design and implement open approaches in the projects they design and manage.”

Link:

http://www.businessofgovernment.org/sites/default/files/Designing%20Open%20Projects.pdf

Updated:

08/16/2012, 06:08

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.data oa.government oa.usa oa.open_science oa.interoperability oa.case oa.recommendations oa.hhs oa.definitions oa.open_projects oa.nwhin oa.reports

Authors:

abernard

Date tagged:

06/28/2012, 17:05

Date published:

06/28/2012, 17:37