Summary
Abstract
Free and open source software (FOSS) has been a close ally of academia from the beginning. The academic paradigm of publishing scientific results in a transparent and reproducible manner suits well with the open working ethics of FOSS projects, thus fostering great synergies between the two. While FOSS products provide universities with well functioning tools to work on real world business cases in a teaching environment, the scientific community is a major contributor to FOSS herself.
openIMIS is an open source software package designed by a global community to support social protection agencies with a tool to manage financing schemes such as health insurances or social benefit packages. Being certified as Global Good by Digital Square and a Digital Public Good by DPGA, the openIMIS Initiative is very keen to consistently grow her community all along the product value chain. Engaging with Academia is a promising approach to allow a new generations of openIMIS supporters for a future sustainability of the Initiative.
While the openIMIS value chain offers a plethora of academic engagement, the proposed webinar will focus on the potential of academic contributions and learnings in the area of software development itself. The organisational structure of the Developers Committee will be presented and the value chain for software development will be explained. Three examples of previous and ongoing academic project in openIMIS software development will be presented as an incentive for others. The example of the Project: MARS Software Lab will be presented directly by MARS .