SGER: Exploration of new Approaches to Sustainable Infrastructure for Information Sharing

Regents Of The University Of Michigan - Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor MI

Investigators

Abstract

The proliferation of Application Service Providers (ASPs) and software developed through the Open Source Software (OSS) approach offer enormous potential to non-profit, community-serving organizations. OSS could allow these organizations to share their limited software development resources while ASPs could allow for more reliable, lower cost and sustainable information technology infrastructures to be developed and shared by them. Together, they offer important synergies in increasing the effectiveness of community-serving organizations. However, the barriers to sustainable infrastructure are particularly acute in smaller non-profit organizations due to their limited financial and technical resources. Further, generating the requirements for shared systems is difficult. The PI and graduate students will engage in preliminary field studies with agencies delivering social services to the elderly in Detroit. These agencies are considering the use of ASPs and OSS applications and need to develop requirements. Aside from the direct and practical impacts this research may have on those agencies, new, generalizable approaches will be developed for requirements generation for information infrastructures for community-serving organizations.