FOSS, Mobiles, and More

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Chris talk

Mobile & OpenMRS Overview

First attempt: Design forms on windows, compile an executable for palm pilot, send back to windows. Needed to make this open source, free, etc

How to begin: Hire developers? Not an option

Buildup and Serendipity: Cell phones were taking off in SA External dev taking off in SA Found OpenMRS and its generalizable data model OpenMRS had a collaborative network

Built a separate collaborative group to build up the mobile phones application Building around open standards

  • xforms
    • Restrict to a subset applicable to mobile forms

Group was able to carve up the development into separate chunks

  • framework backend
  • presentation layer
    • epihandy for windows mobile or
    • java for smart phones

Struggling with a name -- Mobile Forms ?

AVOIR "Avian Influenza" project Possible collaboration...collect data in the field, take it back to central and examine it.

MF is generic enough to collect any type of data -- medical or not

There are many players in the bird flu area. Open source has a large oppurtunity here.

Drumnet project Collect data from farmers, send to central. Very similar to OpenMRS's patient encounter/visit based model


900 million people in Africa

  • 4% have access to internet
  • 20% have cell phone and 60% have access to a cell phone – 600 million have some form of access to the Internet. Massive opportunity to develop mobiles as a computing platform with access to the Internet.

<Steve> The relationship between open source and commercial enterprise is one of the most interesting discussions to have. OS is an innovation lever and enables one to innovate faster. In early days of Internet, people started linking OS stacks together which resulted in Apache and fuelled a next layer of innovation –Joomla, Drupal, pHp Nuke. There has always been commerce at every level but shifting the platform raises the bar that allows higher level innovation to be achieved.

<Steve> More important to have the ability to innovate rather than to innovate. In

<Mark> Want to build technology and participate in the exciting world but don’t know how. Spend a lot of time in implementation.

<Derek> Moodle uses a model of licensing the implementers. Notion of proprietary not relevant if one isn’t going to distribute the application. <Chris> Commercial applications may eventually be outcompeted as open source applications duplicate their applications. If they participate in the shared development, they will potentially have a stake in the development and may discourage competition from open source developers.

<Mark> Playing fields are not always equal and donors sometimes distort the market.

<Steve> IDRC worries about distorting the market which provides a rationale for open source so that it is available to everybody. But also in business of sustainability so some tension there. Very good to look at existing models of successes and failures eg 37singles developed Ruby on Rails as a framework for innovating web applications and launched a number of successful ISP business (basecamp etc). Differentiator is the fact that they had to ensure that they could innovate faster than anyone else.

<Jonathan> Would like to see how the two can work together in the interests of the market and the role of open standards in this.

<Mark> Think of ways that commerce and open source can work together and areas where they can collaborate at a level where have joint problems, eg a joint background that speaks to operators.

<Jonathan and Chris> Would like to look at the platform more – has potential for DrumNet.

<Steve> Would like to get away from the notion of open source as a risk increaser. In a connected world, this is not necessarily the case (although may do so in an unconnected world).

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