Christian, Molly & All,
I'm neutral on the issue of incorporation. If it can help then I'm
for it. But I don't want the discussion on incorporation to
distract us from the possibility of convening our next OSHCA conference.
I'm a strong advocate of having our next OSCHA Conference, with or
without incorporation. I've started raising the question of support
for a conference with some of the organizations I work with. Here's
how I describe it:
Can your organization host a three day conference for 150 people,
providing auditorium, break out rooms, technical support (wifi +
audio-visual facilities with staff), food (continental breakfast plus
full lunches) and facilities support (pre-conference planning,
attendee registration services, facility access and security, etc).
I explain that the conference underwriting has to be substantial
because international attendees will need to pay for travel and keep
their on site costs to lodging and incidental daily expenses.
Consider this post the discussion fork that poses the question: What
month in 2006 is best for an OSCHA meeting?
I think it goes without saying that many of us will be in Brisbane in
August 2007
http://www.medinfo2007.org/
But maybe we can also meet in 2006. As it is still January, now is
a good time to focus on this question.
With best regards,
[wr]
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On Jan 14, 2006, at 2:31 PM, Christian Heller wrote:
Hi Molly,
some weeks ago, about 22 of us mailing list members expressed their
support for incorporating OSHCA. I take the liberty to list those:
- Molly Cheah
- Brian Bray
- Adrian Midgley
- Fred Trotter
- Tim Cook
- Christian Heller
- Joseph Dal Molin
- David Chan
- Nandalal Gunaratne
- K.S. Bhaskar
- Thaddeus N. Albers
- Mike McCoy (indirectly through Joseph Dal Molin)
- Jubal John (interest in background of the key people involved)
- 7 further people who voted on the second mailing list-question
- Alric O'Connor
- Thomas Beale
(here I stopped counting)
--> about 22
This is not that many of far more than a hundred list readers.
However, it is not few either. It is a start.
... champion, promote, co-ordinate, collaborate etc open source
applications
in health care.
... "The Open Source Health Care Alliance is a collaborative forum to
... "OSHCA is a community of people in the health care and
informatics
Nevertheless, I was asking myself again for reasons to get OSHCA
incorporated: A website might suffice to promote OSHCA; a mailing list
to collaborate; coordination between projects may not necessarily be
needed as every project follows its own ideas/technologies anyway.
A common website could serve as portal providing lists and evaluations
of our projects -- what was lately asked for in this list again.
But there are already plenty of such portals (Debian-Med etc.).
Some of these portals just lack the necessary continuity and updates.
Most of us have their own project and invest considerable time into
it.
I for one do not have many resources and will to contribute much to
organisational/paper work for OSHCA, since concrete results will be
few.
It is my guess that many other project developers have similar
thoughts.
So let us look for more points speaking for an incorporated OSHCA!
A list of concrete reasons to incorporate OSHCA coming to my mind:
- organise conferences (seems to be easier for booking places etc.)
- get publicity (taken more seriously than a loose group of people)
- approach governments and large corporations
- ask for funding
If somebody sees more points, please add to this list!
It should, in my opinion, only contain points that *cannot* be
achieved with mailing list/ website/ loose group of people alone.
Once we have identified these points, they may become OSHCA's focus.
[..]
next steps to form the protem committee and get OSHCA
incorporated. We
also need to decide where OSHCA should be incorporated - developed or
developing country and then zoom into deciding the specific country.
Correct steps.
It doesn't matter much to me in which country OSHCA gets
incorporated, as
long as it is a democratic one, and without "ruling-the-world"
tendencies.
Perhaps a developing country is even better, since it may better know
what is really needed urgently.
My apologies for this "lengthy" e-mail. Just to make up for the lapse
.... :) I still have the list of volunteers for the protem
committee. In
between someone requested for a short write-up of each as well....
Such a write-up should also contain which open source software (OSS)
project or other organisation people represent, i.e. in which area
of OSS they are active.
Well done, Molly! ... and a quite short extract (as I like it).
Thanks,
Christian
Yahoo! Groups Links
[wr]
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will ross
mendocino informatics
216 west perkins street, suite 206
ukiah, california 95482 usa
707.272.7255 [voice]
707.462.5015 [fax]
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