Unfortunately, good code won't speak for itself. Even the most elegantly designed and well-written codebase that solves the most pressing problem in the world won't just get adopted on its own. You, the open source creator, need to speak for your code and breathe life into your creation. That's where technical writing and documentation come in. A project's documentation gets the most amount of traffic, by far. It's the place where people decide whether to continue learning about your project or move on. Thus, spending time and energy on documentation and technical writing, focusing on the most important section, "Getting Started," will do wonders for your project's traction.
News
How to Contribute to Open Source Healthcare Projects for COVID-19
By Joshua Pearce | April 15, 2020
Many of those that are familiar with the maker movement, including me, believe there is a significant opportunity to apply open source design principles and mass-scale collaborative distributed manufacturing technologies (like open source 3D printing) to at least partially overcome medical supply shortages during the COVID-19 pandemic...Many people agree there is enormous potential with the approach despite the challenges and have started to self-organize to develop open source hardware to fight COVID-19. The largest group is Project Open Air. They are a group of "Helpful Engineers" who have congregated to aid in the COVID-19 pandemic response by developing both open source hardware and open source software. The Helpful Engineers are working on medical devices such as open source ventilators, to create a solution that can be quickly reproduced and assembled locally worldwide. Read More »
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A Snapshot of ONC's Global Health IT Efforts
By Aisha Hasan | April 7, 2020
On today's World Health Day, I'd like to give you an inside look at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology's (ONC) global health IT work. Advancing digital health (or e-health) is gaining worldwide momentum as nations seek to leverage health IT. While each country and jurisdiction has a different approach to healthcare, global digital health advancements are becoming a common thread across the world. In December 2010, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the European Union (EU) signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to galvanize cooperation on advancing digital health in both regions. The MOU focuses on three areas: interoperability, workforce, and innovation.
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Pandemics Are the Mother of Invention
By Kim Bellard | March 30, 2020
Many believe that the Allies won WWII in large part because of how industry in the U.S. geared up to produce fantastic amounts of weapons and other war materials. It took some time for businesses to retool and get production lines flowing, during which the Axis powers made frightening advances, but once they did it was only a matter of time until the Allies would prevail. Similarly, COVID-19 is making scary inroads around the world, while businesses are still gearing up to produce the number of ventilators, personal protective equipment (PPE), tests, and other badly needed supplies. COVID-19 is currently outnumbering these efforts, but eventually we'll get the necessary equipment in the needed amounts. Eventually. What intrigues me, though, is how people are innovating, inventing new solutions to the shortages we face. I want to highlight a few of these:
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How open source software is fighting COVID-19
By Jeff Stern | March 29, 2020
Since the end of January, the [open source] community has contributed to thousands of open source repositories that mention coronavirus or COVID-19. These repositories consist of datasets, models, visualizations, web and mobile applications, and more, and the majority are written in JavaScript and Python. Previously, we shared information about several open hardware makers helping to stop the spread and suffering caused by the coronavirus. Here, we're sharing four (of many) examples of how the open source software community is responding to coronavirus and COVID-19, with the goal of celebrating the creators and the overall impact the open source community is making on the world right now.
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How Laboratories and their Systems can Weather Natural Disasters and Pandemics
By Alan Vaughan, and John H. Jones | March 25, 2020
We are currently experiencing a global pandemic - which, while perhaps included in disaster preparedness Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) by many labs as a possible disaster, still has caught most the infrastructure and health systems of most nations largely unprepared, and is causing major disruption because it was arguably not seen as one of the most likely events. Disaster preparedness has typically tended to focus on IT and data management risks and/or natural disasters. SOPs center around standard, daily lab safety. The truth is that whatever the odds of a particular disaster, they become 100% once they happen. It's important to have sufficient risk-reduction SOPs in play, and a good Continuity Of Operations Plan (COOP) for each potential scenario to ensure the best chance of coping during the event and recovering afterwards.
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Corporate Resilience During A Pandemic
By Jeremy Boccabello, and Curtis Bartell | March 24, 2020
As humanity grapples with the spread of COVID-19 globally, the emotional response is to do something, anything, everything. But how do we take that energy and successfully adapt? Most prudent organizations have had on their radar more visible threats like hurricanes, earthquakes, power outages, terrorism, and war. The quiet pervasiveness of a pandemic seems to have caught us by surprise. But is adapting to a pandemic really that different? The good news is that proven principles still apply. Read More »
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3 Metrics To Measure Your Open Source Community Health
By Kevin Xu | March 21, 2020
Community building is table stakes in the success of any open source project. Even outside of open source, community is considered a competitive advantage for businesses in many industries—from retail, to gaming, to fitness. (For a deeper dive, see "When community becomes your competitive advantage" in the Harvard Business Review.) However, open source community building—especially offline activities—is notoriously hard to measure, track, and analyze. While we've all been to our fair share of meetups, conferences, and "summits" (and probably hosted a few of them ourselves), were they worth it? Did the community meaningfully grow? Was printing all those stickers and swags worth the money? Did we collect and track the right numbers to measure progress? To develop a better framework for measuring community, we can look to a different industry for guidance and fresh ideas: political campaigns.
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ONC Releases Final Rule on Interoperability: How Might it Affect Public Health?
By Noam H. Arzt, Ph.D. | March 20, 2020
On March 9, 2020 the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) released its final rule on the 21st Century Cures Act: Interoperability, Information Blocking, and the ONC Health IT Certification Program. Referred to by some people as the "Information Blocking Rule," since this is the primary topic, the document actually covers a host of other issues related to interoperability driven primarily by requirements of the 21st Century Cures Act. In addition to the final rule itself you can read the ONC press release, a comparison between the proposed and final rules, and lots of other resources.
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Telework Challenges in a Mobile Device World Facing a Pandemic
By Simon Hartley | March 17, 2020
The coronavirus pandemic is affecting all walks of life. Hospitals and medical professionals are on high alert. Schools are closing. Professional sports teams are playing in empty stadiums and, in some cases, not at all. Companies and governments are reviewing how to reduce health risks while maintaining productivity. An obvious response is to expand their telework programs for employees. Telework or remote worker programs have their challenges, and the concern is genuine for the federal government. There is the need to re-work policies, stretch budgets, deal with security concerns, and a big part of the challenge is the changing workforce as smartphones – rather than PCs and landlines of yesteryear – are the tools of choice.
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How To Write Effective Documentation For Your Open Source Project
By Kevin Xu | March 12, 2020
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