USM Bish wrote: >On Sat, Jan 29, 2005 at 02:38:52PM +0000, Thomas Beale wrote: > > >[ some snipped ] > > >>Q - should the list be completely open to any openEHR member >>(i.e. anyone with a login), as for the existing 3 lists? >> >> >> > >YES ! Open to all ... even list-lurkers (like me). > >My Q: Why have four lists ? Amalgamate all and have just one >with all components shared. There is so much cross-over of the >material that there is hardly a single post which can be stated >to be specific for any of the sub groups ... the volumes too >are not much bothersome, as of now ;-) > > Well, we currently only really have 2 lists - technical and clinical. As time goes on, my guess (and our original prediction on which this was based) is that the clinical list will emerge as the forum for detailed discussions about the domain - how to describe it, formalise it, how to agree on concepts, ontological discussions and so on, while the technical list will be about modelling, system design, deployments, security, and so on. Note - I am not saying that clinical people shouldn't subscribe to the technical list, nor that IT people should not subscribe to the clinical list. On the contrary, clinical people care very much about GUI screen efficiency (they'd just as rather be playing golf or at the pub rather than entering data as anyone else) and system performance; health informatics developers on the other hand should make it their mission to understand the domain. So the two main lists are not to separate people, but to separate discussions. It doesn't work for every topic, but I think it will generally serve us well as time goes on.
Other efforts with more lists don't do well in my opinion - HL7 has many lists, and there is heavy cross-posting all the time. In the Australian GeHR project we ran in 1998-2002, we had about 6 lists, and it was too many. But I think one is too few. We suggested the early adopters/implementers list for people who a) are actually doing implementations, or want to lurk on such a list, and b) won't mind the extra message load. Many people won't want another list, which may generate quite a lot of messages which they will never read, so it seems reasonable to have just one more list for people who want to talk about the nitty-gritty issues of actually building systems based on openEHR. I would be interested to hear further from those who expressed interest in the adopters/implementers list. - thomas beale - If you have any questions about using this list, please send a message to d.lloyd at openehr.org
