Our panelists have done a thorough job of describing the advantages and disadvantages of delivering their programs with an open source and open data approach. We – the IntelliDrive team – believe that these open and collaborative approaches will deliver more benefit than not, and, as you’ve heard mention over the past day and a half, we plan to structure significant parts of the IntelliDrive Mobility program in this manner.

To do so, we’ll need to provide the tools to make this happen.  These tools include the data environments and data sets that have been described by Gene McHale and the open source portal which I will now describe.

The portal will be a web-based tool for sharing information and supporting collaboration. 

For the applications that will be funded through IntelliDrive, developers will be required to use the portal and work in a collaborative manner to develop applications.  Other developers who use their own funds may also participate by requested approval to have access to the portal. Definitions of access and how and whether access may differ at different levels is still under discussion.  We are considering a hierarchy of levels whereby the first level of approval will allow users to see what is in the portal, but not use the assets unless they provide further information about who they are and how they intend to use the assets.  With this information, users will be granted access to the assets for use.

The assets within the portal will include all of these listed on the slide.  In addition, documentation on governance and use will be provided as well.

Recognizing that collaboration is broad, users who come to the portal can expect to see user-friendly functions that support such actions as creation of new projects, collaboration between inter-related projects, or recognition of contributors to core assets, among other things.

The work on developing the portal has just recently been awarded and is moving forward.  One of the key next steps is to invite users to discuss their needs.  We recognize that some of the user needs will be based on how the portal is governed and what rights are assigned to developers for intellectual property.  At this time, we are just considering the governance and we’ve looked at a number of licenses and how they have been used by other agencies.  For now, we believe that the NASA open source license is probably one that we will tailor for our purposes – your review and comment back to us on that license is useful to us; however, we also believe that one or more licenses may govern the portal based on different uses of the source code and data sets.  This analysis is just starting and, when available in a couple of months, will be posted for comment.

Which leads me to discuss the key steps in developing the portal.  Our next set of actions is to conduct user needs workshops through either meetings or webinars.  Using information from these user sessions, we’ll develop a Concept of Operations that, once vetted with stakeholders, will be taken down a level to requirements specifications and testing, and finally, implementation which we expect in early 2012.

Here is our current schedule of actions.

Importantly, once the portal has been delivered, we’ll be considering whether it must remain as a USDOT-funded effort or if others might take it on.  The analysis regarding sustainability and business models will be part of the policy analysis effort which will be discussed in the next session.

James----(pass along to James for summary and then Q&A)