transparency

See the following -

Lessons From The ACA Health Insurance Marketplace Failure

Rob Atkinson | The Innovation Files | November 13, 2013

One can’t pass a single day it seems without seeing in the news coverage of the problems with the Affordable Care Act’s Health Insurance Marketplace (HIM). But what is perhaps most surprising is not that the web site had problems, but that people are surprised that it had problems. [...] Read More »

Lessons In Openness From Japan's "Business Reinvention"

In The Business Reinvention of Japan, Ulrike Schaede explores Japan's approach to economic development in the late 20th and early 21st century. Her thesis is that this approach-what she calls an "aggregate niche strategy"-offers important lessons for the West by balancing the pursuit of corporate profit with social stability, economic equality, and social responsibility and sustainability. It's also a case study in the power of open organization principles, which come to life in Schaede's account. I would argue that Japan's "aggregate niche strategy" was successful, in part, because of them. In this review, I'll explore Schaede's argument about Japan's economic development in order to demonstrate how open principles played a role in Japan's "reinvention." In this first part, I'll provide some historical, economic context necessary for understanding Schaede's argument. In the next part, I'll explore in more detail the implications of Japan's strategy and the role open principles clearly played in it.

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Lessons Learned for Building an Open Company with Transparent Collaboration

In the first part of this two-part series, Building a business on a solid open source model, I described how an open source business needs to provide a solid ground for all stakeholders, users, contributors, employees, customers, and of course investors. Foundations, licenses, and trademarks can be helpful in building an open ecosystem. Open source communities need supporting organizations to work transparently, otherwise there are barriers to contribution. Code might be public, but code dumps (like Google tends to do with Android) don't always facilitate collaboration. To encourage collaboration, you must go one step further and be proactive...

Let’s Build A Drug! Biopharma Startup Launches Crowdsourcing Tool To Pick Compounds

Stephanie Baum | MedCity News | October 24, 2012

A biopharma startup believes that when it comes to deciding what conditions it should develop drugs to treat, the decision should be left to a public vote. Read More »

Linux Whips Apple's macOS in the Race to the Automobile CarOS

I don't think much about it while I'm driving, but I sure do love that my car is equipped with a system that lets me use a few buttons and my voice to call my wife, mom, and children. That same system allows me to choose whether I listen to music streaming from the cloud, satellite radio, or the more traditional AM/FM radio. I also get weather updates and can direct my in-vehicle GPS to find the fastest route to my next destination. In-vehicle infotainment, or IVI as it's known in the industry, has become ubiquitous in today's newest automobiles...

Maine Doctor Cuts Prices In Half By Refusing Health Insurance

Kristen Butler | UPI.com | May 29, 2013

Maine doctor Michael Ciampi stopped accepting insurance enabling him to cut prices in half and make house calls. Read More »

Major Patent Pool Opens Up Research On Neglected Disease

Yojana Sharma | SciDev.Net | October 31, 2011

Research on drug development for neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), tuberculosis and malaria will receive a boost from a major initiative launched by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) last week (26 October). Read More »

Making Transparency Work for Harvard's Dataverse Project

A culture of transparency permeates the Dataverse project, contributing to its adoption in dozens of research institutions around the world. Headquartered at Harvard University, the Dataverse development team has more than a decade of experience operating as an open source project within an organization that values transparency: the Institute of Quantitative Social Science (IQSS). Working transparently helps the Dataverse team communicate changes to current development efforts, provides opportunities for the community to support each other, and facilitates contribution to the project...

Mandatory Data Retention Defeated In Australia, For Now

Daniel Nazer | Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) | June 24, 2013

For the last few years, Australia’s security agencies have been pushing for the mandatory retention of the communications data of every citizen. [...] Read More »

Many Antidepressant Studies Found Tainted by Pharma Company Influence

Roni Jacobson | Scientific American | October 21, 2015

The latest study, published in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, which evaluated 185 meta-analyses, found that one third of them were written by pharma industry employees. “We knew that the industry would fund studies to promote its products, but it’s very different to fund meta-analyses,” which “have traditionally been a bulwark of evidence-based medicine,” says John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at Stanford University School of Medicine and co-author of the study. “It’s really amazing that there is such a massive influx of influence in this field.”

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mHealth Apps are Just the Beginning of the Disruption in Healthcare from Open Health Data

Alex Howard | O'Reilly Radar | June 8, 2012

Two years ago, the potential of government making health information as useful as weather data felt like an abstraction. Healthcare data could give citizens the same "blue dot" for navigating health and illness akin to the one GPS data fuels on the glowing map of geolocated mobile devices that are in more and more hands...

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mHealth Oversight Suggestions Nearing End Of The Beginning

Anthony Brino | Government Health IT | July 19, 2013

The long and winding road to federal regulation or oversight of mHealth still has some ground to cover, but a key Food and Drug Administration Safety Innovation Act sub-workgroup has tentative suggestions that are about three organizational layers removed from the FDA. Read More »

mHMtaani: US-Supported Program Empowers Community Health Workers Through Mobile Technology

Jonathan Rucks | Frontline Health Workers Coalition | August 8, 2013

In places like the Deep Sea Slum of Nairobi, Kenya, the dangers associated with pregnancy and child birth are not to be taken lightly. Read More »

Microsoft and Partners Combine the Cloud, AI, Research and Industry Expertise to Focus on Transforming Health Care

Peter Lee | Microsoft Blog | February 16, 2017

...Healthcare NExT, a new initiative to dramatically transform health care, will deeply integrate greenfield research and health technology product development, as well as establish a new model at Microsoft for strategic health industry partnerships. Through these collaborations between health care partners and Microsoft’s AI and Research organization, our goal is to enable a new wave of innovation and impact using Microsoft’s deep AI expertise and global-scale cloud.This initiative includes investments in resources for our partners to capture new opportunities to apply AI to healthcare, such as the Microsoft AI in Health Partner Alliance, an expanding group of partners focused on advancing health technology. Alliance members will receive unique training and access to Microsoft technologies, engineering expertise and data sets. Read More »

More Aggressive Oversight Of Agency FOIA Compliance Is Needed, GAO Says

Joseph Marks | Nextgov | September 10, 2013

The government ombudsman for evaluating agencies’ compliance with the Freedom of Information Act should be more aggressive, a congressional auditor said on Tuesday. Read More »