In my last blog, I waxed on about the virtues of partnership as a strategy for building a technological solution like The CAPTURE Project. The focus of my last blog was about the efficiencies one can gain by using other people’s “stuff” but this time around I would like to talk about quality and coherence… and zombies.
Zombies love brains. They really love brains. CAPTURE loves brains: big, smart, creative brains. While one might try to make the syllogism that CAPTURE is populated with zombies, I would like to point out that CAPTURE staff don’t actually eat brains, we just gather them together and harness them for the greater good (Really! Pinky swear!). I call our philosophy the Zombie Manifesto for Product Development: the more brains, the better.
The problem with bringing a number of big, juicy brains together is that money, control, turf wars and recognition can all become significant impediments to collaboration. The CAPTURE Project intends to combat these issues by using open source and open architecture development processes where we will simply give our resources away to whomever wants them. I’ll talk more about the specifics of our open source and open architecture plans in future posts but, as I write this, we have yet to build anything so I would like to focus some attention on how one of our current partnerships is exploring the boundaries of collaborative creation in an open way. It does not involve zombies… as far as we know.
The Online Health Program Planner (OHPP) was developed by a team led by Larry Hershfield at The Health Communication Unit (THCU) on behalf of the National Collaborating Centre for Methods and Tools (NCCMT). It is a wonderful tool that helps health promotion program planners organize and summarize their thoughts as they generate their program plans. OHPP has been recommended by the Ontario Ministry of Health Promotion as a very good tool to support the implementation of the Ontario Public Health Standards for chronic disease prevention. We like the tool so much here at The CAPTURE Project that we have decided to support building in some new features. We are not alone. The Health Promotion, Chronic Disease and Injury Prevention Section of the Ontario Agency of Health Protection and Promotion (OAHPP) has also decided to support some development at the same time (Melody Roberts and Brian Hyndman being the principal contacts).
In case I haven’t lost you yet, let me “clarify” things with a little alphabet soup. There are now 4 partners in the mix: THCU, OAHPP, NCCMT and CAPTURE. Each has its own agenda, scope, stakeholders and jurisdiction but the connection between us is a dedication to improving the health of Canadians through better use of evidence IN practice and through the collection of better evidence FROM practice. We all share the belief that continuous quality improvement for practitioners can only be achieved by helping them learn from what they do using real-world evidence.
So, how is this complicated arrangement working so far? It is early days but work is proceeding on the development of a supercharged version of the OHPP tool, the partners have started to talk about long term plans for the tool and data sharing agreements are starting to take shape. It is a very exciting project.
One final point worth noting is that the partners on this project have been able to work together without feeling the need to align ourselves with a formally articulated, unifying grand plan. We have been able to follow our unique mandates while simultaneously achieving some coherence in action based on our respective support of the OHPP tool. Let it be said that, although CAPTURE favours the Zombie Manifesto for Product Development, one doesn’t have to adopt a zombie-like state in order to partner with us. Just bring that delicious brain of yours to the table and good things will happen.
