Greetings, I can see a specific pattern emerging in the recent mails of this thread, to which I'd like to response, and contribute. I will repeat my point I've made some time ago in this discussion, and by doing so I will insist on it. To deliver what openEHR is capable of, there is a significant requirement for time and money. Therefore I agree with Tom's points about posts and funding, and disagree with Erik and Tim, if I'm getting what they've been saying right.
There is a consensus one can identify, about what is actually demanded from the openEHR standard. All the names heavily involved in this domain have discussed these requirements in time, some seeing a larger set of requirements than the others. At a very simplistic level, hours is what we need indeed. But there is a threshold for the amount of hours me, you, or anybody else needs to put into openEHR to deliver what is clearly demanded. With such a complex problem, we need lots and lots of hours, and the threshold which turns the required work into a full time position is reached very quickly with openEHR. The perception of this cost is different for everyone. Going back to the anology I've used, everyone is asking for what they need, which is way smaller than the total demand, and this is mostly likely to be the reason for people to say "how hard can it be?, I'm just asking for XYZ!" Delivering what a party asks for, without breaking the consistency of the solution (which makes it a solution in the first place), requires a lot of work and coordination. As in many things in life, people (including me) are only interested in what they're looking for, and if it is not there, than it does not matter to them if there is huge amount of work and promise out there. I do the very same thing every day. But there is also another side to this fact: when you contribute, your contribution does not necessarily solve a lot of others' problems. You may think that individuals each committing a limited amount of time into the solution may develop what we all ask for, but you simply can not. You need to set priorities of tasks, based on the actual impact of the outcome of the tasks, and unless everybody who puts input in any way knows absolutely everything about everybody else's requirement, you can not do this. So often I see this necessity either neglected, or its very existence not accepted. Many of the other works so often referred to are similar in one way or another to our project(s) here, but in my opinion that similarity is not strong enough to suggest that what has worked in other foundations, projects would also work with openEHR. Size and scope of the task at hand, the problem domain, the commercial space around the domain all matter in success or failure of initiatives like openEHR, and just looking at outcomes and only including one or two of the factors which led to those outcomes do not produce meaningful examples. Just like many other groups out there, openEHR is suffering from an asymetry. The input regarding the requirements and what should exist is gigantic, compared to input to deliver the results. Also, the cost of making a request is much lower than actually responding to that request.. This is not a bad thing, not a complain or rant, this is just a fact of this kind of organization. It is just that you need to acknowledge this situation to solve the problem, and develop a way to solve the problem with this picture in mind. Whereever we are with openEHR, this is where we are now. This is the solution we have in our hands, which reached this point as a result of whatever happened in the past, which will never ever change. openEHR was born in its own way, grew its own way, and due to million things effecting its domain, ended up where it is now. Looking at the history of other works won't change this. Their evolution brought them to where they are, better or worse, and openEHR's brought us here. Let me specialize Tom's argument: as far as I know, no member of the openEHR community who is putting his/her work out there for others to used freely, is getting paid just for doing so. To tackle the tasks I've outlined above, there should be people who are funded to perform these tasks. People's work on openEHR in their own companies, environments are not relevant unless they end up being available to the rest of the community, and there are very few instututions who let their intangible assets go into public domain. We need to do a huge amount of work, and I personally don't see this work being done in any other way than a properly funded, planned, and managed approach. You can't break down all tasks and diffuse it into some good intention based completely democratic virtual work force. openEHR has lots of tasks with this nature at hand, and many things which has worked in other scenarios won't work here because of this. Best Regards Seref On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 12:44 PM, Tim Cook <timothywayne.cook at gmail.com>wrote: > Hi Tom, > > On Mon, 2010-11-15 at 16:25 +0000, Thomas Beale wrote: > > a few points informally (I am not on any boards of any organisations, > > so these are my own thoughts): > > * any organisation like openEHR needs some core paid people to > > execute key functions, and to maintain continuity. There is an > > 'officers' level, which runs any organisations, including > > admin and other support staff, and there is an operational > > level. > > * for the operational level, there are typically posts like CTO, > > CMO, infrastructure management, project coordination, and so > > on. If the organisation is to do properly what its members > > want - typically 2 things: a) manage specifications/standards, > > including member involvement in this, and b) manage open > > source projects, potentially largely staffed by volunteers - > > then it has to have a few dedicated posts. Otherwise it > > becomes no-one's responsibility to actually coordinate things, > > keep infrastructure running etc. > > If these are the thoughts of, whom I consider to be, the most open > source/content aware person within the openEHR Foundation. Then I > *highly* recommend: > > Hippel, Eric von. > Democratizing innovation / Eric von Hippel. > ISBN 0-262-00274-4 > > (available in PDF via a CC license; btw) > > Also, you may want to re-visit your comments about Linux.org and > Apache.org. The history of how they became organizations is more > important than the fact that they exist today. > > I hope you find this useful. > > Regards, > Tim > > > > -- > *************************************************************** > Timothy Cook, MSc > Project Lead - Multi-Level Healthcare Information Modeling > http://www.mlhim.org > > LinkedIn Profile:http://www.linkedin.com/in/timothywaynecook > Skype ID == timothy.cook > Academic.Edu Profile: http://uff.academia.edu/TimothyCook > > You may get my Public GPG key from popular keyservers or > from this link http://timothywayne.cook.googlepages.com/home > > > _______________________________________________ > openEHR-technical mailing list > openEHR-technical at openehr.org > http://lists.chime.ucl.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/openehr-technical > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... 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