I’ve been in New Zealand this week, meeting with government, academic, and industry leaders to discuss the IT challenges ahead - social networking-based teamwork for health, mobile applications, precision medicine analytics for decision support, and cloud computing all within a framework of protecting privacy. I believe that New Zealand has a unique opportunity to leapfrog the rest of the world with healthcare IT breakthroughs that show the rest of us what is possible from a 4.5 million person learning lab. Why? The perfect storm for innovation requires alignment of technology, psychology, and implementation. New Zealand is divided into 20 District Health Boards which improve the health of their populations by delivering high quality and accessible health care...
Feature Articles
Bringing DevOps to the Classroom
As coordinator for the Minnesota State Digital Curricula Initiative, Charles Betz faces a unique challenge: How to teach DevOps (agile, relentless, fast) in an academic context (inflexible, deliberate, slow)? But Betz has found a way—and it's been successful enough that he's ready to share it. He'll do just that at this year's DevOps Enterprise Summit during his presentation, "Influencing Higher Education to Create the Future DevOps Workforce." Betz, an instructor at the University of St. Thomas spoke with Opensource.com about working with the next generation of student programmers...
What Software Documentation Can Learn from Tabletop Gaming
Do you remember Monopoly and Life and Clue, and all those old classic board games you played as a kid because sometimes you were just that bored? Do you recall ever reading the instructions? Probably not, because nobody reads the instructions for those games. We all had a friend who kinda knew how to play the game, so they taught us how to play, and that was good enough. (Seriously, go back and re-read the instructions for Monopoly; I'll bet you Internet money that you've never played the actual game.) If you ever did try to read the instructions, you found that they'd been written back in 1962, and read almost identically to the repair manual to the General Electric Refrigerator. They were just as detailed, just as complete, and just as interesting...
6 Ways to Use Open Tools to Better Support Indian Languages
India is a large and a populated country that makes up a large base of Google consumers. So in recent years, Google's widened support of world languages for its various products has been a blessing. It has specifically helped Indian people grow their use of and participation on the Internet. For one, Google Summer of Code helps students experiment with and build prototypes that enhance language-based software. Another way is through Google Translate, a web and app-based platform that provides machine translation from one language to another. It is predominantly maintained and serviced by volunteer contributionss...
Will Your DNA Become Your Own Medical Record
It seems very likely that, within the foreseeable future, you will be able to have your DNA sequenced in near real-time, analyzed for defects/mutations, and have therapies specifically tailored to your results -- possibly even actually editing your genes/DNA. This is, after all, the goal of Precision Medicine. What would make this even cooler is that, as long as we're reading your DNA, your entire medical history is also being read -- maybe from the cloud, but maybe from synthetic DNA that you've had implanted, or even from your own DNA, if we start writing directly to it. And, of course, these DNA records would be updated in near real-time as well. Talk about owning your own data!
Georgia State Government Earns National Recognition for Web Accessibility
The state of Georgia was nationally recognized last month by the National Association of State CIOs for its Accessible Platform Initiative. The initiative is the first step in Georgia's drive to improve access to all its digital properties. It updated code and designs on the state's enterprise web platform to meet modern accessibility guidelines in a move that impacted nearly 80 state websites. The national recognition for this initiative is not only a feather in Georgia's cap, it's yet another win for open source software and a testament to the benefits of an enterprise web platform. Opensource.com has published articles in the past about Georgia's enterprise platform as a service, as well as the product strategy for the platform...
Open Chemistry Project Raises Up the Next Generation of Researchers
In 2007 I took part in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) developing the Avogadro application. As we were developing Avogadro, we founded The Open Chemistry project as an umbrella project to develop related tools for chemistry and materials science. Our goal is to bring high quality open source tools to research communities working in these areas, and to develop other tools to complement the Avogadro molecular editor. This year we were very pleased to be selected as a mentoring organization for GSoC; a few of our mentors are Geoff Hutchison, Adam Tenderholt, David Koes, and Karol Langner, who are all long-time contributors in related projects. And, we were lucky to get three slots for student projects...
APIStrat Boston to Highlight Link Between APIs and Open Source Projects
This year's API Strategy and Practice (known as APIStrat)—to be held in Boston on November 2-4—has a strong open source component running throughout the event, and with little wonder. Successful API strategies more often than not either contribute new open source projects, or draw on the rich source of tools already built by the open source community. The API mindset has always lent itself to an open source ethos. APIs are all about opening up internal assets, data, and systems in order to connect and collaborate with a wider ecosystem of partners and end users...
New Zealand Can Lead Healthcare IT
How Open Access Content Helps Fuel Growth in Indian-Language Wikipedias
Mobile Internet connectivity is growing rapidly in rural India, and because most Internet users are more comfortable in their native languages, websites producing content in Indian languages are going to drive this growth. In a country like India in which only a handful of journals are available in Indian languages, open access to research and educational resources is hugely important for populating content for the various Indian language Wikipedias...
Your Toaster May Be Bad For Your Health IT
the cyberattack last week...shut down access to many major websites...What does this have to do with health care? Plenty, as it turns out. IoT devices are increasingly helping us manage our health and medical care. IoT in health care is expected to be a huge market -- perhaps 40% of the total IoT, and worth some $117b by 2020, according to McKinsey. Expected major uses include wearables, monitors, and implanted medical devices. The problem is that many manufacturers haven't necessarily prepared for cyberattacks. Kevin Fu, a professor at the University of Michigan's Archimedes Center for Medical Device Security, told CNBC: "the dirty little secret is that most manufacturers did not anticipate the cybersecurity risks when they were designing them [devices] a decade ago, so this is just scratching the surface."
Distributing Encryption Software May Break the Law
Developers, distributors, and users of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) often face a host of legal issues which they need to keep in mind. Although areas of law such as copyright, trademark, and patents are frequently discussed, these are not the only legal concerns for FOSS. One area that often escapes notice is export controls. It may come as a surprise that sharing software that performs or uses cryptographic functions on a public website could be a violation of U.S. export control law...
How OpenStack mentoring breaks down cultural barriers
Victoria Martinez de la Cruz is no stranger to OpenStack's mentorship opportunities. It's how she got her own start in OpenStack, and now a few years later is helping to coordinate many of these opportunities herself. She is speaking on a panel on mentoring and internships later this week at OpenStack Summit in Barcelona, Spain. In this interview, we catch up with Victoria to learn more about the details of what it's like to be a part of an open source internship, as well as some helpful advice for people on both sides of the mentoring process...
The Basics of Open Source Quality Assurance
Open source depends on a sustainable community to develop code rapidly, debug code effectively, and build out new features. Because community involvement is voluntary, people's skills, levels of involvement, and time commitments can vary. Given the variable nature of these factors, along with the fact that open source often relies on a philosophy of "release early, release often," quality assurance can be become challenging. In order to maintain the quality of the projects, the community including the developers, quality engineers, and the users of the projects have to work together...
A Look Inside the 'Blinky Flashy' World of Wearables and Open Hardware
While looking at the this year's All Things Open event schedule, a talk on wearables and open hardware caught my eye: The world of the blinky flashy. Naturally, I dug deeper to learn what it was all about. Though Gina Likins and Jen Krieger of Red Hat would like to leave a few surprises for the lucky folks who attend their talk, they told me they can promise at least the following: ideas about how you can integrate simple circuitry into your outfits to "tron-ify" your wardrobe,
ways to add interactivity to art projects (or science projects! or exhibits!) that turn a spectator into a co-creator...
How Apache Kafka is Powering a Real-Time Data Revolution
Two years ago, Neha Narkhede co-founded a company called Confluent to build on her team's work with Apache Kafka. In this interview, we talk about how lots of companies are deploying Kafka and how that has led to a very busy GitHub repo. Narkhede will keynote at All Things Open in Raleigh, NC next week. Q: What was it like leaving LinkedIn to start your own company? Narkhede: It was a great experience and a natural extension of the mission that my co-founders and I had been working on for the past several years—of bringing Apache Kafka and our vision for a new future for a company's data architecture built around streaming data to the forefront...