Re: [openhealth] Liberty HSF formation process
Hello Fred and Dr. Valdes, First of all please accept my personal congratulations to you and your team members on the establishment of the Liberty Health Software Foundation as well as upon receiving the 501(c)3 status! It is indeed a wonderful evolution of an initiative dedicated to the Free Libre Software within the Health Care and Informatics community. I wish you the organization continued growth and success. You have indeed put forth an interesting list of questions and answers. Regarding the revenue stream to conduct business as usual and keep the social enterprise sustainable, I see the following avenues of considerable importance and growth: 1. Training Programs - Both Paid and Sponsored 2. Healthcare Information Systems Certification programs and in this case can be Basic, Intermediate and Advanced User Certs 3. A professional network that runs Liberty Health Software Conferences and Seminars for the masses around the 50 states as well as in Canada and other countries where you would like to expand out to. 4. The training manual is a good idea but I see the need for a book or a number of books on Free Open Source Software in Health Care and FOSS Health Care Information Systems. You can produce these books and distribute them under Creative Commons free for online download where as print and sell them through www.lulu.com. 5. There is no harm in maintaining a community of FOSS developers at the foundation virtually or physically. Software Bundles with Support options. You can provide software free but charge for the following: a. Software Bundles with personal support US$250, group support US$500, clinical support US$1000, large clinic support US$5000, Small Scale Hospital Support US$10,000, Medium Scale Hospital Support US$50,000 and Enterprise Scale Hospital Support US$1-500,000 plans. b. Consulting Plans c. Training Plans d. Maintenance Plans e. Remote Support Plans f. Customized Development Plans 6. I would also recommend you to apply for a grant to the Rockefeller Foundation as they are still supporting numerous FOSS programs and organizations. 7. I would recommend you to float CCHIT development on Google Summer of Code and other FOSS Initiatives. 8. Partnership with universities, especially medical healthcare capacity development or academic centres to offer certificate trainings. 9. In the end, you need a strong marketing plan, every social enterprise needs it and so do you so that the world knows you exist and you add value to the social and economic systems either in the US or abroad. 10. Get working on public relations, use means such as google adwords, facebook and linked in. Get the show rolling! I hope these ideas will be useful and I am always available for joining the foundation in strategy support etc. Btw, this me just in case: http://satc.pk/?q=node/14 -- Regards. -- Fouad Bajwa FOSS Advocate (South Asia) @skBajwa Answering all your technology questions http://www.askbajwa.com http://twitter.com/fouadbajwa On Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 3:33 AM, fred trotter fred.trot...@gmail.com wrote: FOSS Community, I am writing to let you know that Liberty Health Software Foundation has received 501c3 status. Dr. Valdes and I have been working on this for over two years and we are ready to present this to the community-at-large. The purpose of Liberty Health Software Foundation (LibertyHSF) is to improve the delivery and science of healthcare by supporting the development and use of Free/Libre Healthcare Software. We are in a unique position with the organization because we want to both be careful with how we set things up for long term sustainability, as well as getting some critical tasks done now. I wish this email were somewhat more organized, but as it stands it is just several lists of directions that we want to take as well as open questions about a slew of issues. Feel free to email me privately or call me to discuss anything that you would prefer to remain outside the public forum. I am and will remain baised towards those who have contributed towards our community, I will listen to everyone, but I will act based on the opinions of those who have sacrificed for our movement. OPEN QUESTION? How do we choose a BOD? OPEN QUESTION? We want a mix of FOSS corporate and FOSS community interests. Sometimes what our successful FOSS companies do is in the interests of the FOSS developer and user interests and sometimes it is not? Our community has several non-vendor roles: deployers, which include IT specialist who deploy FOSS, clinical users, developers and finally the consumers who have their health data stored in FOSS systems. How do we balance community and vendor interests? OPEN QUESTION? We want to include and embrace hybrid FOSS/proprietary companies like Mysis, ECW and DSS but still acknowledge that at least part of their interests are to support proprietary software. How do we strike a
Re: [openhealth] Liberty HSF formation process
Thanks for replying... I sent you a private email about coordinating our efforts. -FT On Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 1:10 PM, karo...@it-science-center.de wrote: Hi Fred! Congratulations! As co-chair of the EFMI LIFOSS WG and member of the IMIA OS WG I am looking forward to work together with LibertyHSF. I am confident that we share the same long term goals and that we can collaborate to achieve these comon goals. Our current focus is on fostering the collaboration between different FLOSS in health care projects and to organize conferences and workshops to disseminate knowledge about the benefits and prospects of FLOSS. We recently organized a workshop at BIOSTEC (OSEHC) and will organize a second edition of OSEHC in 2010. We also organized a workshop at Med-e-Tel 2009 and will have another one in 2010. At MIE2009 there will be a workshop about FLOSS -HC and in 2010 we participate in the organization of the International workshop on ehealth in emerging economies (IWEEE). Thanks for taking the initiative of founding LibertyHSF and looking forward to work together with you. Best wishes, Thomas Karopka FOSS Community, I am writing to let you know that Liberty Health Software Foundation has received 501c3 status. Dr. Valdes and I have been working on this for over two years and we are ready to present this to the community-at-large. The purpose of Liberty Health Software Foundation (LibertyHSF) is to improve the delivery and science of healthcare by supporting the development and use of Free/Libre Healthcare Software. We are in a unique position with the organization because we want to both be careful with how we set things up for long term sustainability, as well as getting some critical tasks done now. I wish this email were somewhat more organized, but as it stands it is just several lists of directions that we want to take as well as open questions about a slew of issues. Feel free to email me privately or call me to discuss anything that you would prefer to remain outside the public forum. I am and will remain baised towards those who have contributed towards our community, I will listen to everyone, but I will act based on the opinions of those who have sacrificed for our movement. OPEN QUESTION? How do we choose a BOD? OPEN QUESTION? We want a mix of FOSS corporate and FOSS community interests. Sometimes what our successful FOSS companies do is in the interests of the FOSS developer and user interests and sometimes it is not? Our community has several non-vendor roles: deployers, which include IT specialist who deploy FOSS, clinical users, developers and finally the consumers who have their health data stored in FOSS systems. How do we balance community and vendor interests? OPEN QUESTION? We want to include and embrace hybrid FOSS/proprietary companies like Mysis, ECW and DSS but still acknowledge that at least part of their interests are to support proprietary software. How do we strike a balance of encouraging the risks that these hybrid companies are taking, but still remaining true to the FOSS values? Liberty HSF goal: Certification: Create a certification system compatible with FOSS - Current plan: work with CCHIT to become the scholarship organization for CCHIT certification, and to make CCHIT have a reasonable cert option for FOSS - Backup plan: become an FOSS oriented CCHIT alternative OPEN QUESTION? How do we deal with CCHIT as an organization AND as a community of independent thinkers? OPEN QUESTION? When do we decide that we need to 'fork' CCHIT and setup an alternative certification system? Liberty HSF goal: Vendor organization: be a FOSS EHRVA (this is what we are talking about here) - Represent FOSS Vendors the way that EHRVA claims to and HIMSS pretends it does not. - Lobby (in compliance with the rules for 501c3) for FOSS vendor interests - Create our own definition of 'meaningful use' to through into the mix OPEN QUESTION? We need to give a vehicle the FOSS vendors to express their views, as distinct from the community. Vendor profitability is critical to our community, we need FOSS vendors to form the backbone of our community. How do we carve out a space for vendors specifically, while ensuring that the overall purpose of Liberty HSF to represent every member of our community is not damaged? - Community Organization: be a FOSS HIMSS - Create and back FOSS conferences (like DOCHS and FOSSHEALTH) OPEN QUESTION? How do we run better conferences and meetings so that eventually we can compete with HIMSS? - Development organization: be a FOSS RWJ - Fund and/or internally develop FOSS solutions that are 'orphan', the kind of projects that are not clearly profitable, but are still useful. - Like documentation? - Like user
Re: [openhealth] Liberty HSF formation process
1. Training Programs - Both Paid and Sponsored That makes sense, but it is unclear what we should train on. WorldVistA is, as at first blush, a better organization for handeling VistA training, and there are typically corporate backers that offer training for other projects. Still I would like to consider that door open. 2. Healthcare Information Systems Certification programs and in this case can be Basic, Intermediate and Advanced User Certs We are considering setting up an alternative to CCHIT. User certification will be difficult if we are to remain project neutral. 3. A professional network that runs Liberty Health Software Conferences and Seminars for the masses around the 50 states as well as in Canada and other countries where you would like to expand out to. I am learning alot about running Health conferences with my experience with FOSSHealth. It is an open question how many conferences can be supported by us and if we should move to support local users groups. We are a very small community and i can (and have) called in favors to ensure good talks at a single conference, but how to ensure that there are good talks across the world? Not sure. 4. The training manual is a good idea but I see the need for a book or a number of books on Free Open Source Software in Health Care and FOSS Health Care Information Systems. You can produce these books and distribute them under Creative Commons free for online download where as print and sell them through www.lulu.com. Again, how do choose which projects get books like this published? This is a really good idea and a big part of what we would like to do... 5. There is no harm in maintaining a community of FOSS developers at the foundation virtually or physically. Software Bundles with Support options. You can provide software free but charge for the following: a. Software Bundles with personal support US$250, group support US$500, clinical support US$1000, large clinic support US$5000, Small Scale Hospital Support US$10,000, Medium Scale Hospital Support US$50,000 and Enterprise Scale Hospital Support US$1-500,000 plans. b. Consulting Plans c. Training Plans d. Maintenance Plans e. Remote Support Plans f. Customized Development Plans I do not want to get into software support which I consider to be the domain of for-profit companies. We do not want to be seen as competing with the vendors that we hope to represent. Still if the vendors themselves clalled for some kind of support program, we might be willing to consider it. 6. I would also recommend you to apply for a grant to the Rockefeller Foundation as they are still supporting numerous FOSS programs and organizations. That is exactly the plan. 7. I would recommend you to float CCHIT development on Google Summer of Code and other FOSS Initiatives. This is a good idea, but I would not want to do this in competition with different projects. 8. Partnership with universities, especially medical healthcare capacity development or academic centres to offer certificate trainings. Not sure how this would work.. but perhaps a textbook? 9. In the end, you need a strong marketing plan, every social enterprise needs it and so do you so that the world knows you exist and you add value to the social and economic systems either in the US or abroad. Agreed. 10. Get working on public relations, use means such as google adwords, facebook and linked in. Get the show rolling! Agreed! I hope these ideas will be useful and I am always available for joining the foundation in strategy support etc. Btw, this me just in case: http://satc.pk/?q=node/14 -- Regards. -- Fouad Bajwa FOSS Advocate (South Asia) @skBajwa Answering all your technology questions http://www.askbajwa.com http://twitter.com/fouadbajwa -- Fred Trotter http://www.fredtrotter.com [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
[openhealth] Liberty HSF formation process
FOSS Community, I am writing to let you know that Liberty Health Software Foundation has received 501c3 status. Dr. Valdes and I have been working on this for over two years and we are ready to present this to the community-at-large. The purpose of Liberty Health Software Foundation (LibertyHSF) is to improve the delivery and science of healthcare by supporting the development and use of Free/Libre Healthcare Software. We are in a unique position with the organization because we want to both be careful with how we set things up for long term sustainability, as well as getting some critical tasks done now. I wish this email were somewhat more organized, but as it stands it is just several lists of directions that we want to take as well as open questions about a slew of issues. Feel free to email me privately or call me to discuss anything that you would prefer to remain outside the public forum. I am and will remain baised towards those who have contributed towards our community, I will listen to everyone, but I will act based on the opinions of those who have sacrificed for our movement. OPEN QUESTION? How do we choose a BOD? OPEN QUESTION? We want a mix of FOSS corporate and FOSS community interests. Sometimes what our successful FOSS companies do is in the interests of the FOSS developer and user interests and sometimes it is not? Our community has several non-vendor roles: deployers, which include IT specialist who deploy FOSS, clinical users, developers and finally the consumers who have their health data stored in FOSS systems. How do we balance community and vendor interests? OPEN QUESTION? We want to include and embrace hybrid FOSS/proprietary companies like Mysis, ECW and DSS but still acknowledge that at least part of their interests are to support proprietary software. How do we strike a balance of encouraging the risks that these hybrid companies are taking, but still remaining true to the FOSS values? Liberty HSF goal: Certification: Create a certification system compatible with FOSS - Current plan: work with CCHIT to become the scholarship organization for CCHIT certification, and to make CCHIT have a reasonable cert option for FOSS - Backup plan: become an FOSS oriented CCHIT alternative OPEN QUESTION? How do we deal with CCHIT as an organization AND as a community of independent thinkers? OPEN QUESTION? When do we decide that we need to 'fork' CCHIT and setup an alternative certification system? Liberty HSF goal: Vendor organization: be a FOSS EHRVA (this is what we are talking about here) - Represent FOSS Vendors the way that EHRVA claims to and HIMSS pretends it does not. - Lobby (in compliance with the rules for 501c3) for FOSS vendor interests - Create our own definition of 'meaningful use' to through into the mix OPEN QUESTION? We need to give a vehicle the FOSS vendors to express their views, as distinct from the community. Vendor profitability is critical to our community, we need FOSS vendors to form the backbone of our community. How do we carve out a space for vendors specifically, while ensuring that the overall purpose of Liberty HSF to represent every member of our community is not damaged? - Community Organization: be a FOSS HIMSS - Create and back FOSS conferences (like DOCHS and FOSSHEALTH) OPEN QUESTION? How do we run better conferences and meetings so that eventually we can compete with HIMSS? - Development organization: be a FOSS RWJ - Fund and/or internally develop FOSS solutions that are 'orphan', the kind of projects that are not clearly profitable, but are still useful. - Like documentation? - Like user manuals? - Like toolkits? - Like services that the community needs, like CA services etc etc OPEN QUESTION? How do we tell the difference between projects that need extra development dollars and coders, and those that are largely self-sufficient? How do we choose what projects to support? To a great extent, this will have to be determined by those who donate either time or money? OPEN QUESTION? How do we interact with other organizations like Open Health Tools and WorldVistA? My plan so far: The following seems obviously true and represents 'already made' decisions. - We need to move away from me as benevolent dictator of this organization quickly, to establish credibility. But a full BOD should be something that the community has input on, we should have general nominations etc etc. So Dr. Valdes, David Whitten and I will appoint an arbitrary interim BOD (announced soon) which will allow us to move quickly and take our time thinking about the BOD issue long term. - No one is going to have tons of time for this, and there need to be sub-groupings of LibertyHSF for different purposes,
