VA VistA Open Source Custodial Agent

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has selected their open source Custodial Agent to develop and manage an open source community around their VistA electronic health record system.
The Information Applications Group, www.tiag.net, has been selected as the prime contractor. They have set up a provisional website at http://osehrca.org.

It will be interesting to watch this Custodial Agent be set up(or stood up in DC parlance).
It looks from the contract that it will be busy 60 days for tiag and the VA, with by-laws, licensing terms, code repository, website, community engagement plans, and certification function to all be set up in that time period.

Some interesting tidbits---

• "VA believes that in order to efficiently maintain VistA’s high performance, it must make significant improvements to the component integration process, and that this would be best accomplished in an open source framework."

  You better believe it. That is why I developed the Ruby integration gem vistarpc4r. It isn't pretty under the hood. I plan on getting vistarpc4r to be some part of this process
  

• "Organizations and commercial vendors can build proprietary products and technologies and have them certified"

  I can't wait to see how the certification process works.
  

• "VA might initiate a project request to the CA for codebase refactoring"

  Good! Like I said, it isn't pretty under the hood.
  

• "The contract shall be for a one (1) year base period of performance."

  What will the next one be for?

• "...the Contractor shall provide, within forty-five (45) days after award, a draft Community Enablement Plan capturing the mission and objectives of the Custodial Agent including a statement of CA resources required. Concurrent with the activation of the Custodial Agent, the CA shall release draft plans to the open source community for comment."

  Hmmm...we went to a conference where I got to hear some comments about open sourcing VistA...should be entertaining.

• "Performance metrics"

  Part of the performance evaluation for tiag is measuring source code contribution, code downloads, number of certification requests, and number of members. I'm glad to see these are included. Hopefully this information will be posted for all to see.

A open source custodial agent model is pretty innovative for the US government to embrace. I hope it works.

I'm also curious what this means for Medsphere's OpenVista, WorldVista and DSS's vxVista. Will their enhancements to FOIA VistA be contributed to CA VistA. Or will they switch from using FIOA VistA to CA VistA as their underlying source and keep their existing models.