There seemed to be equal excitement on the part of the State Department staff, the organizers, the speakers and the audience, all aware that this was a new kind of hybrid, maybe a new kind of government, and a time for more cross-cutting collaboration and engagement around innovative, impactful ideas, partnerships and initiatives.

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Open Source for America (OSFA) recently published a report card on open technology and open government across several U.S. federal government departments and agencies. The results: One-third of agencies received a passing grade

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Palomar Pomerado Health has created a mobile application that enables doctors to look at medical records from a number of medical record providers via Android-based devices and email or video chat with other doctors about those records.

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A group of commercial open source software vendors and various nonprofit advocacy organizations have joined forces to encourage broader use of open source software and open standards in government IT. The coalition, called Open Source for America (OSA), aims to educate government officials and promote procurement policies that give open source software solutions equal priority to proprietary competitors.

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Open-source software has been making inroads into U.S. federal agencies for years, most notably in January when the U.S. Department of Defense set up an internal forge to host open-source software for use by the government.

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Mobile phones have served as a catalyst in the process of global integration of communities. Handsets—even simple ones with SMS and voice capability—are used to collect information from, and disseminate it to areas which are hard to reach by traditional methods.

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The cost of military health care, up 300% in the past decade, is eating a giant hole in the Pentagon's budget, according to a report released Monday by a group of defense experts.  The Defense Department expects to spend $52.5 billion on health care in 2012, a 300% increase since 2001, the report says. 

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“2010 will go down as one of the most angst-ridden years in health care . . . [but] medical electronics will be at the nexus of where health care is going in the next decade.” With those opening comments at the recent EE Times Medical Electronics Summit, Charlie Whelan, a director of life science consulting at Frost & Sullivan, encapsulated the outlook for the health care sector.

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This past month marked an exciting development at Open Medicine: the launch of the Open Medicine wiki. The first publication to be housed on the wiki is a scoping review of studies examining the use of asynchronous telehealth by Deshpande and colleagues. The interactive article allows users to log in and edit, delete or add content to the review and to look at changes other users have made to the document.

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Increasing efforts by enterprises to glean business intelligence from the massive volumes of unstructured data generated by web logs, clickstream tools, social media products and the like has led to a surge of interest in open source Hadoop technology, analysts say. Hadoop, an Apache data management software project with roots in Google's MapReduce software framework for distributed computing, is designed to support applications that use massive amounts of unstructured and structured data.

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