1. Open Source as an Instrument
of Public Policy
Brian Behlendorf
US Dept of Health and Human Services (Advisor, Contractor)
Board Member: CollabNet, Mozilla, Benetech
Co-Founder: Apache Software Foundation

2. What Open Source Software
Development Really Taught Us:
● How to make consensus decisions while
maintaining pace
● How to effectively re-use prior work
● Peer ownership and stewardship
● A reinforcing of open standards, and vice-versa
● A connection to reality - code used in
production serves a grounding purpose to the
work being done.
● “Usage is like oxygen for applications” - Matt
Mullenweg

4. Why drive CONNECT as an Open
Source community?
• Accelerate adoption of the NHIN standards across
the healthcare industry, beyond the Federal sector.
• Improve quality through transparency.
● “To a sufficient number of eyeballs, all bugs are
shallow." - E. Raymond
• Accelerate features on the development roadmap.
• Provide a "diagonal" learning curve for adopters
● Make it easy to do the simple things, and possible to
do everything else without hand-holding.
• Ensure the best use of current technologies and
design practices in CONNECT.

5. What's the approach?
• Encourage and facilitate bug reports, feature
requests, ideas, and code contributions.
• Encourage questions from new participants to
build a database of ad-hoc knowlege about the
platform.
• Promote the emerging commercial ecosystem
around CONNECT through the vendor directory
and success stories.
• Promoting major contributors to “committers”,
who are peers to the contracted developers.

6. What Tools Do We Use To Do That?
• Public development artifacts in:
● Subversion (for public code versioning)
● A public bug database
● A Wiki (for all development documentation, whiteboarding of
proposals, and all other collaborative document work)
• Public and inclusive development processes:
● Discussion forums
● Ability to “subscribe” to commits, new/changed bugs or issues,
build reports, etc.
• Visibility into the sprints and CCB meetings via the wiki,
conference calls, and more
• Public hack- code-a-thons
• Vendor Involvement

11. The NHIN Direct Project
● Focused on directed, secure health messaging
● Project has been 100% public since inception
● After much discussion and research, a simple
approach: SMTP, DNS, S/MIME, Certificate
Authorities
● From use cases in April to v1.0 Reference
Implementations in November
● 200+ participating organizations & individuals
● 5 pilots about to launch.

22. Government engagement of the public
in co-developing solutions requires:
● A focus on specific outcomes, building something rather than just polling
● Transparency from day one in processes and assets
● Recognition of participant motivations
● Facilitation by third parties or the participants themselves, humbling the
brand of government
● Expectations of perpetuity; but also an eventual hand-off to an NGO
From Open Source software communities, we get:
● Ways to make consensus decisions while maintaining pace
● Ways to effectively re-use prior work
● Peer ownership and stewardship
● Reinforcing of open standards, and vice-versa
● A connection to real, production-environment experiences