Molly Cheah wrote: > I was going to ask Thomas the same question about attending the OSHCA > conference. Obviously I would like to - I am just examining my travel situation - since I already have to be back in Australia in August (MedInfo) and also in the next few weeks....I would like to be able to commit either myself or another one of the Australian-based openEHR experts for the session soon. > He can anchor the session(s) on standards/open standards. > I forwarded the latest remarks on "open" standards by Stephen Chu from > HL7 NZ to the OSHCA Committee mailing list, where he would like the word > "open" to be dropped. Maybe we can "compromise" on the use of the word > "open". We can then give the HL7 and APAMI attendees a good round of > debates as to why "open" is a necessary criteria for standards. Does > "open" mean "freely available" as in the way we use the word "free" as > in "freedom" and not as in "free beer"? > I think that if we are to spend any time at all on this question, it should be couched in terms of "what business model makes sense for standards development"? And we should show why open source thinking has something to offer.
To give you an idea of the kind of thinking that could be exposed, here is my opinion: I think they should be open and freely usable - in fact I think the only sensible business model for standards development is to give them away free and charge some money for compliance testing. What ISO and many other bodies do is completely wrong, and hence fails most of the time (there are far more ISO standards than are actually used, because people cannot even examine them for fitness without paying for them. Hence a vast amount of talking, time off and air miles are wasted on producing documents that never see the light of day). > Incidently I still have no volunteer to be the chairman for the > Scientific sub-committee of the Organising committee for the Conference. > I've volunteered to take care of logistics and I think everyone can chip > in for publicity. Any other sub-committees? > We will provide publicity through the openEHR lists (which is a substantial number of people these days), but I can't offer to build any content due to being too busy for the moment. Is there an early announcement that can be distributed yet? I would want the dates to be pretty solid before doing this, i.e. I don't think it looks good to have to distribute correctional announcements. Just to continue on my "software ecosystem" comment a few posts back, I think this conference would be an opportunity to show more than just "why open source is good" in a general sense. We already have the proof that this is true in some areas, with category-topping efforts like Linux & Apache. We also already have some great medical open source systems. What we don't have is a standard-based, interoperable ecosystem of software that we can offer the industry as a whole. What I think we want is to show that we can build a cathedral, but do it in the bazaar. We need something that looks like objectweb.org, but in health. Putting openly developed standards together with openly developed software is the key to the future in my view, and we should be developing the necessary thinking now; the conference is an ideal opportunity to aim for exposing such ideas. - thomas
