Today marks the launch of an ambitious and forward-thinking project that the nonprofit I work for has been cooking for rather a long time: IntraHealth OPEN. IntraHealth is collaborating with Youssou N’Dour and other musicians in an effort to fund training for health workers in Africa using open source technologies. Youssou and several other musicians are donating songs to the effort, which should be available for downloading from the OPEN website today. IntraHealth, African governments and private institutions have been working together to develop open source solutions that take advantage of technology that has been widely adopted in Africa and that can enable the efficient delivery of health information.
I have had a peripheral involvement in OPEN as it has developed, contributing ideas and writing when needed, and I have watched it grow from a germ of an idea with interest. Of course, I do think there will be some natural synergies between the project I am heavily involved in, developing open source HR information systems for managing data about health workers, and the goals of OPEN. I am looking forward to seeing how that all shapes up.
OPEN is all over the web, so if you want to learn more, here are some ways to do so:
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shannon.turlington AT gmail.com 
