Committed to the Open Source Movement in Healthcare
Established
16 October 1998
Copyright
© 1998–2008
Health informatics Europe
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E-community on a shoe string - Open Source
This project in Malaysia is an illustration that high specification hardware and the latest proprietary software is not necessary to establish an effective and interactive web presence. Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia : - A group of computer geeks using freely distributable software and communicating via the Internet puts together an e-community system on a shoe-string budget. Sounds familiar? It should - its a model becoming familiar to a worldwide community of Open Source software users and advocates. Using the tools of the Free Software/Open Source community, The Malaysian Open Source Group has assembled for The Thalassaemia Association of Malaysia an online social community for Thalassaemia sufferers and their families. At a minimal financial cost I must add. It serves as a clear demonstration of the viability of building a complete e-community based on Open Source software and the Internet as a tool of communication and congregation. What I want to write about here is the story of how this thing came about and what we learned from it as Open Source advocates. It all started with Dinesh's post on the MyOpen mailing list in May '99: " the thalassaemia association of malaysia has proposed a project to create an e-community for thalassaemic patients, their families and healthcare providers. ... i intend to put the whole thing, including the end-user workstations, on opensource software. the plan is to create functionality for a web based e-community with online database of patient profiles, e-forums and e-chats to facilitate patient-doctor and patient-patient relationships, collate requests for desferal - the main drug used in treatment - so that the association can get volume discounts from drug manufacturers. these services would be served off an internet accessible web server. ... ... we could use it as a jumpstart to show the country how opensource software could solve a real need and perhaps in the process establish the use of opensource in other non-profits where cost is a major factor. ... " A chance to put Open Source on show? Where do we sign up? What to do? The plan was simple - with all the GPLed software available there was the best of the breed, a pool of solidly reliable software tried and tested by a voracious community of worldwide hackers. Why, this was the same stuff that ran more than half of the Internet servers worldwide, right? So, we're off to cook us up an e- community on the easy. We secured a Pentium 155 on a "semi-permanent" loan basis from Nah S.H., one of the co-founders of The Malaysian Open Source Group. Not hip nor sexy anymore to be seen using one of this little joes, even if just for word-processing, but with the lean mean FreeBSD daemon we would put in control, the P155 would happily run as an internet server and be the node of an e-community. Download, install and boot up? Was it that simple? Did we mention the paperwork? The Malaysian ICT Initiative, DAGS and TAM (ho-hum) Right, the paperwork ... errmmm ... A little background: As part of the Malaysian Government's ICT initiative, some pilot projects have been chosen to spearhead the development of e-communities within Malaysia. As a kickstart they have DAGS (Demonstrator Application Grant Scheme) which will fund up to 70% of the project cost with no repayment requirement. It would seem that DAGS will usually fund the 1st year of the project and expects the project to be self-sustaining if it is to run longer. The Thalassaemia Association Malaysia (TAM) was approached to start off the TAM e-community as one of the pilot e-community projects. As with all worldly ventures, such a project would need moolah. Being earmarked to kick off an e-community was one thing, to land some moolah to start it off was another. Funding for these project had to be applied for separately and one avenue for funding is DAGS. However, since the people staffing TAM had very little ICT/Internet knowledge and resources, they were totally at a lost at how to go about submitting a DAGS project proposal. Enter Dinesh Nair, agent provocateur. Being an Open Source software developer and advocate himself, Dinesh naturally planned to set up the whole system using Open Source software. With his post on the MyOpenSource mailing list garnering good responses, Dinesh had this to say "here are the people who've volunteered so far. pretty impressive considering i only posted the original 15 hours ago. ... I am encouraged. rephrase: am very encouraged." Well, while Dinesh, Yusmar and Nah were slogging the paperwork to get moolah out from DAGS so that TAM could afford a shiny new server with all the bells and whistles and the kitchen sink et al, they also figured out that they could kickstart the whole thing with just some elbow sweat and some GPLed power. So, lets see what they cooked up .... As part of what they dubbed "Phase 1", Yusmar and Nah set up a simple website under TAM's own registered domain tam.org.my. Yusmar, our own local Chucky the Daemon, installed the server with FreeBSD, Apache, majordomo, sendmail, and BIND. He designed the webpages and layout (and even temporarily hosted that jazzy piece of P155 iron in his office). He also assisted in putting up some of the Q&A web pages. Phew! Talk about a lot of cooking and brewing ... Yusmar is also presently playing the role of sysadmin and alternate webmaster for the website. Nah is currently webmaster and alternate sysadm for the server. Mukhsein, aka Raja Zope, gave some ideas and suggestions on website development (especially using Zope!), but they sadly have to forgo most of his ideas until the DAGS moolah comes through and they get a new piece of iron. The P155, blessed its little Pentium chip and 500MB of storage, effective as it is has rather limited resources to handle intensive website development work. But don't sniff at it, take a surf over to the TAM web-site and look what they achieved under Phase I. Its a veritable smorgasboard of stuff anyone would be proud to have on their corporate web-site. The chefs' serving of Open Source a la carte looks great. Standing on the shoulders of giants made it technically possible at an affordable cost for the Malaysian Thalassaemia community to come online. The crux being the fact that all these software has been licensed using the GPL, making them freely distributable Free Software/Open Source software. What most people would look down their nose at to run games, do their wordprocessing or even go online with, they have converted into an internet server running a variety of services for an e-community. On this Pentium 155 PC with 32 MB RAM and a 500MB hard-disk we installed the FreeBSD operating system, the Apache server, Majordomo, MHonarc and Perl, Sendmail, and BIND. With this combo we are able to offer up on the Internet a web-site, a mailing list, a web-based discussion forum, and simple online event registration forms. Of course when they get the DAGS approval (hopefully within this few months) they plan to expand on the site and what it could offer. Capabilities and content would be expanded having at their disposal a server class machine muscle. It would mean for instance that they could have lots more medical information on thalassaemia in the major languages of Malaysia. They could as well encourage the other state thalassaemia societies to set up home pages on server, and even provide encouragement for some of the more ICT inclined thalassaemic kids to have their own home pages. There are plans to run a proper web-content development platform on it, probably based on Zope. With a back-end Open Source database running on it they could have apps providing access to records of patients, members and supporters. Nah S.H. says, "After we have secured the DAGS money, Phase II will start and this involves the development of some web and database applications to serve the e-community. Some of the apps which will be installed and/or developed are event registration and co-ordination, e-adoption, database of members and volunteers, medical info of members, drug ordering and collation. The resources and skills of members of My-OpenSource will again be needed to develop these apps. Towards this end, some of the early My- OpenSource volunteers who have given some ideas on the devlopment platform etc. will be called upon to help out." They will of course ultimately aim for volunteers from the Thalassaemia community to pick up the skills neccessary for them to run and continue the E-Thalassaemia project by themselves with minimal input from the Malaysian Open Source Group. This would be important so that MyOpenSource hackers presently involved in the TAM project could then go on to other similar spirited projects, and if successful, these projects would one after another be beach-heads for Free Software and/or Open Source software within the local IT mindshare. They would in many ways push back the frontiers of ignorance and demonstrate to the community at large the viability of Open Source software to open IT doors for non-profit communities. "Using open source, a group of people, with some IT skills and very little financial resources, set up an e-community and Internet presence for a voluntary and charity organisation with the aim that ultimately the volunteers from the organisation will take over the running of the e-community." said Nah. "It is all about ICT empowering the people with the aid of open source. ICT for the people by the people! :)" copyleft 2000 Malaysian Open Source Group.
Thalassaemia
Association of Malaysia
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