As the Consortium grew, we dropped the request for 5% effort contributions requirement from participating sites due to management complexity and instead expanded the on-site Vanderbilt team to include a second programmer. However, partner site experts enjoyed the opportunity to collaborate with likeminded informatics specialists across the country, thereby maintaining the original community spirit. To encourage continued Consortium activity, we declared that actively contributing site representatives would have the ‘loudest voice’ in new feature prioritization. Consortium growth increased participation in the weekly all-hands calls, prompting purchase of licensed webinar software (GoToMeeting), and Vanderbilt set up an official REDCap administrators’ email listserv for asynchronous e-mail communication. Formal code versioning was enabled, and we began using a hosted intranet solution (TRAC) for code distribution, wiki communication, and bug tracking/reporting. The first REDCap Consortium Committee was formed to review technical gaps associated with setting up REDCap in a validated environment, with REDCap technical developers subsequently using the analysis to prioritize related feature development.
