August 22, 2008 10:07 AM PDT
Infectious disease surveillance system goes open source
I reported earlier on the Collaborative Software Initiative's important work with the State of Utah on an infectious disease surveillance system. This week CSI and the State of Utah announced that the system has been open sourced as the Trisano Project:
TriSano is an open source, citizen-focused infectious disease surveillance system that allows local, state and federal entities to collaborate for the good of public health. With TriSano, the Collaborative Software Initiative provides a forum in which subject matter experts (i.e., doctors, nurses and epidemiologists) and software developers work together to facilitate the cre-ation of citizen-centric public health applications. This innovation ensures application features meet the specific requirements of each jurisdiction, allowing public health employees to achieve the goal of protecting lives.
The system itself is useful, but open source makes it broadly applicable and outside the control of any particular government or vendor. It's awesome to see CSI turn open source into something much bigger than just code and licensing. Great work!
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
