Relevant aspects for sustainable open source pandemic apps and platform deployment with focus on community building

Abstract

The global COVID-19 pandemic revealed the necessity for mobile and web-based solutions for a variety of medical processes, e.g., individual risk calculation, communication of health information and contact tracing. Many such solutions are provided in form of open source software. However, there are major obstacles to the sustainable long-term continuation of such projects. As the topic of sustainability strategies is complex, a classification would be useful to help new projects to identify relevant sustainability factors. Based on a literature review a classification for long-term success of open source software was created. This paper presents a classification focusing on five unique categories: (1) structural decision, (2) revenue generation, (3) user focus, (4) openness and (5) community building. It was developed within the NUM-COMPASS project, focusing content-wise on pandemic apps and structure-wise on open-source provision. We provide some insights into the community building dimension by discussing factors that go into building sustainable communities.