EDFix Call #8 afterthoughts: Building “Plumbing” for Business Sustainability

Brian Behlendorf of Collabnet, Apache Foundation and most recently the US Government's Connect project, joined our EDFix call on March 22 to talk about open source approaches to addressing social problems. (I apologize for the poor audio quality on the recording of this very interesting call. Future recordings will be better.)

Two key insights I garnered from the call:

Active Community Building

When US CTO Aneesh Chopra invited Brian to join the Connect project it was already underway and, in fact, had released an open source software package. What Brian started to work on was building an open source community to encourage use and contributions by others, ranging from the 26 government agencies that share health data to the many different constituencies, large and small, in industry. To build an engaged community, Brian focused on using an open development process including public coding "sprints", using open development tools for managing code releases, issue tracking and building a public discussion stream that anyone could join. He also reached out to those constituencies, including taking a trip to Houston for the recent HIMSS conference where he participated in a showcase with 50 other Connect users.

Shared Code Is Plumbing

I'm interested in better understanding commercial interests in open sourcing products and how this might serve business sustainability. Brian suggested that open source infrastructure can be developed to solve generic problems — problems where companies would prefer to "split the cost". This infrastructure is "just the plumbing" that sits underneath products the commercial sector does compete with.

Moving On — To Transportation

Though we may dip back into the Sustainability Commons periodically, calls 8 and 9 are the formal conclusion of that module of the EDFix Conference Calls.

Starting with the April 12 call (at 9am PT), we'll switch to a module on Sustainability and Transportation Priorities, during which we'll be focusing on the opportunities for improving environmental performance in the transportation space. Corporate truck fleets are a major opportunity for greening business. The first call will be with my EDF colleague, Jason Mathers, who will describe the lay of the land. Don't miss it!