FALLS CHURCH, VA – The Alembic Foundation, a new nonprofit organization founded by leaders of the Federal Health Architecture’s CONNECT project, will design and build open source technologies – helping empower citizens to understand and participate in a networked information economy.

“The Alembic Foundation exists for the public good, and to contribute to the public commons through open processes that create open technologies for transformation,” said David Riley, Alembic’s president. “The Foundation will be tackling projects that will benefit from using open technologies to solve real-life challenges. As our first project, the Alembic Foundation is going to expand on the Federal Health Architecture’s (FHA) CONNECT project to create a truly open community that uses open source technology for health information exchange.”

[See also: Federal Health Architecture runs in the fast lane to interoperability.]

The Alembic Foundation will focus on technology projects aimed at the difficult challenges inherent in managing personal and private data by organizations of all sizes on behalf of individuals. It aims to accomplish this in two ways:
 

• By serving as a neutral forum to foster collaboration with organizations and individuals from industry, the public and government to confront and solve real-world challenges
• By providing a basic toolset for communities of interest to organize themselves, define their project(s) and determine the relevant governance structure that assures success

 
Alembic’s first project, Aurion, seeks to use open source software to promote health IT interoperability nationwide in accordance with nationally-recognized standards. Aurion Project stems from the CONNECT program, built by FHA under the leadership of Riley and its chief operating officer, Vanessa Manchester, who previously worked within the FHA program management office.

[See also: Open source: 'One of the last great challenges'.]

Riley and Manchester chose Aurion as the initial project of the Alembic Foundation because they believe the foundation can provide an effective vehicle for the public and private sectors to work together to build upon CONNECT. Supporting this work through a nonprofit organization expands the ability for organizations of all sizes to contribute to Aurion through development and resources. It also opens more opportunities for organizations to participate in setting the requirements for and influencing the direction of Aurion.
 
“Creating a nonprofit foundation to continue the work started by the federal government is the right thing to do," said Brian Behlendorf, chief technology officer for the World Economic Forum. "It allows the project to grow and involve a far larger constituency in its development, with clearer rules of engagement for everyone.  Our hope is that this unleashes greater degrees of collaboration and innovation."
 
Aurion 3.1, released on Monday, is the CONNECT 3.1 codebase rebranded. With the release of Aurion 4.0 on May 3, 2011, the Alembic Foundation will assume a custodial agent role for the development efforts of a robust open community and ecosystem being built around the Aurion platform.  After the release of Aurion 4.0, the Aurion community will continue to evolve the software to ensure that it remains a powerful, open source option for a Nationwide Health Information Network compliant gateway.