Hello again, within the conference agenda, I was asked to prepare the workshop "Getting OSHCA organised", on the last conference day: http://www.oshca.org/conference/conf2007/conf2007prog/view
Among the readers of this mailing list are several kinds of people: - Free/ Open Source Software (FOSS) developers - Experts/ Doctors in the Medical Domain - Politicians, Consultants, Managers We all have different interests and expertise, but need each other: - politicians present our ideas to gain interest and project funding - experts provide us with their domain knowledge, doing analysis - developers evaluate ideas and deliver practical results/ software Being a developer of free software, I have asked myself, what I (and other developers here in this list) would actually expect from something like OSHCA, that a simple mailing list cannot provide? To me, the top maxim has to be: "OSHCA must save each of us as much or better more time than we invest in it, while delivering the same or better results than without OSHCA" I am willing to provide my technical expertise now and later within OSHCA, but I do not want to converge from software development to organising because I think everybody should do what s/he can do best. I don't have to talk about our little spare time, saving development resources, and I understand that many of you (just as me) prefer to code on their projects and see practical results instead of "just" talking. All clear. However, consider some points where OSHCA may help: - provide a forum specialised on FOSS in healthcare, as opposed to more general Linux/ OSS conferences or associations - act as a forum helping FOSS developments work with standards - form a limited consulting group providing expertise to governments etc. - get more publicity in order to find more participants on our projects - have one voice that speaks for us in the public/ press/ to politics - get funding for special developer meetings (hacker sessions) - testing of applications in different environments - exchange user experiences in migrating to free software - collect documents and guidelines (like http://www.freedesktop.org does for various X Window System desktops) - do requirements analysis (medical doctors as domain experts) and provide developers with the corresponding documents As an example, I'd like to mention the Healthcare Exchange Protocol: http://hxp.sourceforge.net/ The projects and developers involved in it communicate just over Internet, which seems to be sufficient. Where could OSHCA help here? It could organise the funding to arrange a hacker weekend like: http://dot.kde.org/1170027049/ where a couple of developers from different projects meet and implement let's say some communication standard like HXP or HL7 CDA or the German xDT etc. (at least the basics). Some of us in the committee raised more points that OSHCA would be spending grant money to do: 1 Find willing FLOSS implementations that only need some funding incentive to build connectivity among themselves (software ecosystem) 2 Help the organizations with those implementations to articulate why they benefit and how other organizations could benefit similarly 3 Provide a detailed source of information (a working demo would be desirable as well) on how this inter-operability was achieved a) What technologies were used? b) What skills were required? c) What standards were used and why? d) How was the effort organised? What OSHCA would clearly NOT do is the following: 1 Define the technical architecture used 2 Mandate use of specific standard (other than requiring a FLOSS approach) This was written from the perspective of a free software developer. Of course, other readers of this list may see other benefits or room for improvement in OSHCA. Please share them with us, for OSHCA's future! Thanks, Christian
