Stormy's Corner

Hi, Will. You have successfully developed a business that provides open
source software to healthcare organizations funded by grants. Can you
tell us a bit about that?

I work in community-based nonprofit health care. Using grant funds to
develop open source software is my standard procedure. Specifically, I
write grant proposals to foundations who fund health care software
deployment projects. When I get the grant, instead of buying some COTS
package I use the funds to add features to an open source project, or
to write a technical implementation guide and release it under an open
source license (see the ELINCS guide on my home page). In most cases
the foundations are uninformed about open source intellectual property
issues. It is typically not a requirement of the grant that I invest
the project funds in open source, it's just something that I do because
of my personal convictions about the need to restore balance to the
intellectual property commons.

Have you been successful?

I have been self-employed at this since 2004. Since then I've used
grant funds to purchase about $500 k in software engineering
development for three open source health care projects — OpenHRE,
ClearHealth and Mirth. Right now I'm working exclusively on the Mirth
project, and have recently lined up an additional $100k in funding to
develop further features on the product roadmap.

How do you go about writing grant proposals?

Basically, as an IT project manager I work entirely at the application
layer within the health care sector. I start with the general list of
tasks that need to be done in the field. I investigate software
functionality from a user-centered workflow perspective. That is, I
don't impose software on users, I look at their current workflow with
an eye towards optimizing the business rules and disrupting COTS
solutions with FOSS solutions. This process identifies gaps where FOSS
tools are not yet enterprise class, and where my grantwriting can raise
the quality of FOSS tools to the expectations of enterprise CIOs.
Then, knowing what I need to build, I pay attention to any grant
funding that becomes available. Right now I'm working on proposals
that will apply for funding from the HITECH act recently passed by
Congress.   Grant opportunities ebb and flow. When one opens up that
is a good match for the opportunities I have identified, then it's
typically a three or four week deadline to gather all the details, pull
stakeholders together and write a credible proposal.

How often are you successful getting a grant?

Writing a proposal is a huge time sink with no pay; that is, it's
entirely a business development write off. I try to focus only on
grant opportunities where I have a good chance of success. When I find
an opportunity, I write a proposal. Overall, my track record as a grant
writer is probably about 30%. That is, I write about 10 proposals a
year and get 3 or 4.

What advice do you offer to open source organizations looking for funding?

I want you to know that you have friends in the field — software
users who are annoyed by and dislike their current cumbersome COTS
tools. Study the user experience at the level of the business rules
their software makes them follow, and look for opportunities to
optimize their work flow by migrating them to new, more agile FOSS
tools. In shops that already understand FOSS applications, you may be
able to write grants to "purchase" open source software development, as
I do.

What do you use the grant money for? Do you pay yourself?

The exact sequence of steps is that I write proposals for free,
sometimes investing more than 100 hours into a proposal. If a
proposal is funded, then as the project architect who developed the
specific technology roadmap, I get the project management contract. In
terms of the whole lifecycle of the process, I get paid for about 60%
of my time, and the rest is invested in studying the sector, attending
conferences, serving on public committees and becoming conversant with
the user perspective in the market vertical.

I'm not a coder. I'm a project manager who writes grant proposals so I
can have interesting work and live in a rural area. When I get a grant,
I pay professional coders to write the apps. Currently I am working on
a huge suite of Java apps (for Mirth, which is published under the MPL)
that will disrupt the business lines of several major COTS network app
vendors in health care. The short version I tell people is that I write
grant proposals to develop free software that can be given away to
nonprofit health care facilities. The reality is a little more
complicated, but its generally too much information so I try to keep
the story short.

Do the grant organizations give you preference because you are developing free software?

The funders generally do not pay attention to whether their grantees
are buying COTS or building FOSS.  When I propose a project to a
funder, about half the time it is not relevant to mention that the
funds will be spent on a FOSS solution;  it would be too much
information to the funder. Also, I got burned once when I didn't read
the fine print in a grant contract and later I discovered that I was
prohibited from releasing that work as FOSS, but otherwise it has not
been an issue. I guess the more important point is that at a basic
level the foundations are generally so tactically focused on their
mission that they don't "get" the underlying strategic social value of
a rich intellectual property commons, so in most cases they treat a
FOSS pitch as incoherent babble that is off topic from their particular
social agenda. So, a lot of the time I leave out the FOSS part and
present the funder with a project that does the specific things they
are mission driven to accomplish.

What advice do you offer to developers looking to fund work on open source software projects?

Find operating nonprofits in the service sector with FOSS savvy CIOs
who need enterprise class tools but are stuck with legacy COTS apps,
and then look to the funders who support those nonprofits. That's my
story. I get it because I was a CIO in the 1990s, and FOSS tools that
were enterprise class were easy to integrate into my shop.

Thanks, Will, for sharing your expertise with us!

I'd like to encourage the GNOME community to submit ideas for GNOME projects, http://live.gnome.org/Grants.