With Open Humans we want to create a site where research participants can share research data so other researchers can re-use and build upon it. One of the first steps here is likely to be creating an enrollment process (similar to what is used in the Harvard Personal Genome Project). Even if we don’t end up using an IRB and consent process, I think the work is useful: right now I know of no turnkey solutions for the general issue of administering an online study enrollment process. Also, at Open Humans I’m sure we’ll want to facilitate online processes researchers use to work with participants.

So I’ve been working on what I hope will be a Django app researchers can use to set up and manage the “study enrollment” aspect of a Django-based research study management site. (It’s admittedly hard to find time to spare.) I also want to have a stand alone site using the app that can be an easy “upload & run study enrollment” software solution with a platform-as-a-service host. A description of the aspirations is also on the current README.md.

We’ve set up an OpenHumans organization on GitHub where we can share open tools like this. I copied my work over to OpenHumans/django_study_enrollment, even though it’s not ready yet, so I have some excuse for an Iron Blogger post. (And maybe to push myself to further improve it. Let me know if you have thoughts, of course.)