By 2005, REDCap adoption had accelerated at Vanderbilt and we learned that other institutions faced the same challenge supporting their local research communities with centralized, HIPAA-compliant solutions for data planning, collection, and management. We were approached by another university (University of Puerto Rico) and offered to share REDCap on the condition they would contribute 5% of a software developer’s time in exchange for receiving the REDCap code and consultations with the Vanderbilt faculty lead. The University of Puerto Rico countered by volunteering 30% effort of a programmer to express their full support of the collaborative venture. After 12 months, the sharing and remote collaboration model had worked so well that a second site (Medical College of Wisconsin) joined under the same reciprocal programming agreement. The Vanderbilt faculty lead and collaborating software developers communicated via weekly Skype calls and transported code by e-mail (e.g., zip files) with little regard for formal versioning, relying instead on active communication and straightforward date-based or as-needed code versioning. Project management included defining and testing program components built at Vanderbilt and at the two partner institutions.
