Open-Source Surgical Training 10 Aug 2021 Last month, our partner Appropredia presented a training workshop to the 10 Discovery Award teams on how to document their training modules to make them easily replicable in low and middle income environments. Appropedia is the site for collaborative solutions in sustainability, poverty reduction and international development through the use of sound principles and appropriate technology and the sharing of wisdom and project information. It is a wiki, a type of website which allows anyone to add, remove, or edit content. One of the foundational objectives of the Global Surgical Training Challenge is the development of tools and instructions to be freely available online to clinical practitioners around the world. The reproducibility of the training modules in low and middle income countries is a central judging criteria. Teams will be uploading their modules to Appropredia. Before the teams got down to the details and mechanics of preparing and uploading their content, they learned about some trends in open source software, science, and education. Julieta Arancio, a researcher at the University of Bath, works on open source hardware. She reviewed the key principles of open source software, science, and education: It’s free It can be redistributed It can be modified It is modular, meaning any part of it can be used, modified, or recreated Essentially, the Global Surgical Training Challenge modules must be well-documented. This allows others to easily find, access and use them. People should be able to reproduce the modules, or modify them to suit their local needs.
