I’m spending a fair amount of time over the next few months working with Russ Waitman and the Greater Plains Collaborative (GPC). It’s an interesting job so far, and one of the things that I find quite appealing about the job is the openness that permeates all of their work.

The GPC has to coordinate multiple projects across the eleven participating sites, and they are using an open source software program called trac to keep everyone informed about what is going well and what is not going well. so, when I started a project looking at a case-control study, they created a ticket for me in trac, ticket #485. This ticket is freely viewable by anyone, though you need permission to edit it. I put in a detailed description of why I think we need a case control study just this morning, and I expect that I’ll get some feedback from other members of the team that they’ll add to the same ticket.

I’ve worked with a lot of people who want to keep everything quiet until after the work is published. I can and do respect that, but I honestly feel that the more broadly you share your ideas about what you’re working on, the better off you are in the long run. So everything that I have ever worked on by myself is described in detail on my web pages and my blog. It’s nice to work with others who are equally comfortable with that approach.