open standards

See the following -

Telework Challenges in a Mobile Device World Facing a Pandemic

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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The Best Way to Share Health Records? An App in Patients’ Hands

Eric Schneider, MD, Aneesh Chopra, and David Blumenthal, MD | The Commonwealth Fund Blog | February 23, 2016

Much has been written recently about information blocking—the inability or unwillingness of hospitals and doctors to share electronic data from our health records with one another. Lack of technical interoperability and regulations protecting security, privacy, and confidentiality are often blamed. But the reality is that technical barriers are falling. The same technology that enables your smartphone to pull sensitive financial data from your bank to pay your taxes or a taxi driver can be applied to your health care records. More importantly, the regulatory path to health records sharing is now open—the rules are already on the books.

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The Goldilocks Problem of Mobile Security - Usability vs. Security

The “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” story begins with a girl tasting porridge. The first bowl is too hot, the second is too cold, and the third is “just right.” This article considers mobile device security for government and organizations. The theme is trade-offs between the usability of a mobile device and security for confidential organizational data such as conversations, messages, documents, images, and locations. The security, confidentiality, and integrity of communication are key. However, if the usability of mobile devices for end-users, administrators, and organizations is too challenging, then the availability of the data for productive work is lost.

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The Next Level Of Open Health Data Tracking Is Good For You

Dick MacInnis | opensource.com | December 4, 2013

Companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon are collecting enormous amounts of information all day, every day. They use powerful supercomputers to analyze this data. Many people use this to better market products to consumers, for instance. Read More »

The Open Government Paradox

In the quarter century since its creation, the Web has been a printing press and broadcast studio for millions of people whose voices would otherwise have been heard by only a few close friends. It opened a whole new world of sharing, and today nearly three-quarters of all Americans say digital technologies have improved their ability to share their ideas and creations with others, according to a 2014 survey by the Pew Research Center. That means most of us are opening to the public minute details of our lives—where we eat, who we love, and how we spend money—all out in the open for others to see...

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The OpenID Foundation Launches The OpenID Connect Standard

Press Release | OpenID Foundation | February 26, 2014

The OpenID Foundation announced today that its membership has ratified the OpenID Connect standard.  Organizations and businesses can now use OpenID Connect to develop secure, flexible, and interoperable identity Internet ecosystems so that digital identities can be easily used across websites and applications via any computing or mobile device. Read More »

The Road to a Career in Open Source and Science

My journey from bench scientist to open science software developer and how I develop better tools for open, reproducible scientific research. Read More »

The Value of EHR Interoperability that Money Can't Buy

There seems to be something missing in our national debate about health care and the use of health information technologies (IT) in this marketplace. Do we want a more 'open' healthy society, or a more closed system? What role should markets play in public health and medical sociology? How do we decide which EHR solutions to acquire? Should we be looking more closely at open source alternatives versus proprietary programs. Should money, quality of care, or some other non-market values determine what's best for the patient? This cuts to the heart of the debate. Consider the hospital that chooses to not pay an expensive proprietary EHR vendor for the enhanced code required by a doctor in order to get the latest real time knowledge for treating a patient's disease.

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Trends in Corporate Open Source Engagement

In 1998, I was part of SGI when we started moving to open source and open standards, after having been a long-time proprietary company. Since then, other companies also have moved rapidly to working with open source, and the use and adoption of open source technologies has skyrocketed over the past few years. Today company involvement in open source technologies is fairly mature and can be seen in the following trends...

U.S. Digital Services and Playbook: "Default to Open"

About this time last year, I laid out some trends I saw for the coming year in government take up of open source software. Looking back now, it appears those trends are not only here to stay, they are accelerating and are more important than ever. In particular, I wrote that "open source will continue to be the 'go to' approach for governments around the world" and that "increasingly, governments are wrestling with the 'how tos' of open source choices; not whether to use it."... Read More »

U.S. Government Seeks Reduced Use of Custom Software, Releases New Policy to 'Free the Code'

As I've written before, there has been a shift, going back almost a decade, away from the debate over whether to use open source to a focus on the how to. The release by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) of the U.S. Federal Source Code Policy on August 8th is the latest manifestation of this shift. It achieves the goal laid out in the Obama administration's Second Open Government National Action Plan (PDF) for improved access to custom software code developed for the federal government. The plan emphasized use of (and contributing back to) open source software to fuel innovation, lower costs, and benefit the public. It also furthers a long-standing "default to open" objective going back to the early days of the administration...

UK Government defines Open Standard's Principles

Glyn Moody | Computerworld | November 12, 2012

In a huge win for open standards, open source and the public, the long-awaited UK government definition of open standards has come down firmly on the side of RF, not FRAND. The UK government's approach is enshrined in an important new document defining what it calls Open Standards Principles. Read More »

UK Government Finalizes Open Standards Principles: The Bigger Picture

Mark Bohannon | opensource.com | November 6, 2012

Last week, the UK Cabinet Office released its Open Standards Principles: For software interoperability, data and document formats in government IT specifications. Read More »

UK institutionalizes preference for open source over proprietary IT

Molly Bernhart Walker | FierceGovernmentIT | March 20, 2013

The U.K. national government issued March 14 a beta version of its Government Services Design Manual , which formalizes a preference for open source technology for digital services..."Use open source software in preference to proprietary or closed source alternatives, in particular for operating systems, networking software, web servers, databases and programming languages," instructs the manual. Read More »

UK's Leeds City Council and Ripple Award Part of Open Source Health IT Project to Lockheed Martin

Press Release | Leeds City Council, Ripple | June 13, 2016

Leeds City Council and Ripple have chosen Lockheed Martin to help deliver aspects of the open source IT development to build an integrated digital care record platform. Ripple has a vision to create an open source health and care platform that allows frontline staff access to the most up to date and joined up care information about an individual – driving better and safer care.

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