NCI Asks for Help with Open Source Development Model

The National Cancer Institute (NCI) has released a formal RFI (Request for Information) asking for help in the drafting of an open source development model for the software NCI has developed under their Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG) project. Although the request is very similar to the VA's "Custodial Agent" effort, it is significantly different in that the caBIG initiative has been in operation since 2003 and more than 70 open source tools have been already developed and enhanced through the program.

The National Cancer Institute (NCI) has released a formal RFI (Request for Information) asking for help in the drafting of an open source development model for the software NCI has developed under their Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG) project.

Although the request is very similar to the VA's "Custodial Agent" effort, it is significantly different in that the caBIG initiative has been in operation since 2003 and more than 70 open source tools have been already developed and enhanced through the program.

The enormous growth of the tool sets, as well as the growth in the communities of scientists, clinicians, and IT people that has emerged around the caBIG initiatives are posing a set of management and collaboration challenges.

As noted in the RFI, "access to the source code of caBIG® tools has allowed many adopting organizations to customize tools of interest to better support the specific requirements of their environment."

At the same time NCI does not have "a consistent mechanism for accessing the current development version of the code or, especially, for contributing custom code back to the main distribution of the tool." As a result, "customizations that may be freely offered and broadly useful are not readily available to other groups."

In addition, it is difficult for a "locally customized version of the code to upgrade to the latest version and therefore stay in synchronization with the regular releases."

caBIG is not only facing technical challenges. The interest in the caBIG's open source research tools has gone far beyond cancer research into many other medical research fields. Furthermore, there are now a large number of private organizations in the United States, as well as groups outside of the country that are are interested in using the tools and collaborating with NCI in their continuing development. 

For these reasons, NCI's Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology (NCI CBIIT)--which runs caBIG--is requesting information from open development community experts about models of open development applicable to the biomedical research community

Specifically, NCI CBIIT "is interested in learning about the types of collaborative development models employed in open development communities and would like to learn about, and receive input from, organizations--for-profit and not-for-profit--that have experience building, coordinating and managing such models."

The goal of the NCI CBIIT RFI is to "identify the range of issues and needs related to business and technical governance as well as the necessary components of a technical infrastructure needed to support an open development initiative."

The RFI has a specific set of questions that the NCI CBIIT would like to see answered and is seeking help from any entity with experience in open source and collaborative development models. Responses to the RFI are due by July 22.