The Department of Health and Human Service’s Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) is working to expand adoption of electronic health records, connect physicians to each other and to a national information network, involve patients in their health care, and broadly improve public health. To achieve these ambitious goals, ONC has been using Internet-like, open project approaches in a number of programs and even outlined similar concepts in their Design Principles document that has guided recent project efforts.

IBM Center author David Witzel examines the evolution of the Internet over the past four decades in a new report, looking for lessons in the use of open project design that could be applied in other policy domains.  He explores how a wide range of autonomous, overlapping, and interconnected open projects ini­tiated by government staff, techies, entrepreneurs, and students around the world resulted in one of the most profound changes in society across the globe

This report offers practical design advice to public managers and political leaders who are facing complex, dynamic public challenges involving multiple stakeholders on issues or problems where there is no clearly defined solution. In these situations, open project approaches have the potential to spark large-scale activity that could fundamentally change society.