Hello everybody, I am sorry I was not able to watch the mailing list in the last 2-3 days. With this mail I want to wrap up all the topics touched in the discussion and give my opinion.
First, I want to thank everybody who takes part in the discussions. Nevertheless, right or wrong, every opinion is valuable, because this triggers a discussion that touches important moments for the care2x community. I believe, all of us want to see the care2x project evolving in much faster rate and be more and more competitive with commercial alternatives. But this depends only and only on the driving force of the project - the community. Who is actually the community? Let me introduce myself as part of this community. I am a young man (probably younger than most of the people here) from Bulgaria - a country that is somewhere in the undefined middle between developed and developing countries. I have almost no medical background. I am currently finishing studying Bioinformatics and want to advance professionally in healthcare software. I am also follower of the Free Software principles. This is why I have chosen to join the Care2x project. I am with the project for less than an year. Professionally, I am a Java software programmer and working for a software corporation. My knowledge in PHP is not very proficient and I cannot made big architectural changes in the project. However, I have enough knowledge and have done some small bugfixes and features to the project. I also have enough skills to assemble patches sent by others with the source code of the project and to organise project releases. This is my piece of contribution to the care2x project. My work here is completely voluntary. I have never seen face to face any from the project members as well as heard their voices. All the communication is made by e-mails. This is what I am as part of this community. There are many others like me - people that give their piece of contribution to make the project evolving. Some stays longer, other just for a little time, but each of them gives some value. This is how, for example, care2x is translated in so many languages. The community is not only the people that contribute to the project code base. It is also the people and companies that deploy the software, use it, or make commercial usage of it like support and education. The mere fact that you are reading this mail makes you part of the community. I cannot imagine that you are reading this mail by accidence, so you have some interest in the project. Talking about the community, it is my opinion that the most valuable achievement that the care2x project has built for these years is the community. It is really hard to build a community that has a permanent interest for so long time. I have tried to do something much smaller than this in my university and I simply failed. Probably, because of lack of experience. I have my lessons learnt. The community is the one that drives the progress of the project. If there is no need by the community the project will not evolve in any direction and will just die. There are generally two types of open source communities. The first one is assembly of software corporation that have a common idea to build open source software for the sake of their own needs. Typical examples of the such communities are the Apache foundation and the Eclipse foundation. There the corporation dedicate some of their employees to contribute to the community. It is interesting that when participating in such community the corporations are good friends, but when they sell the software as part of their products on the market - they are deadly enemies. The second type of open source community is based on contribution by volunteers. These are people that contribute for the sake of some common idea, that often cannot be realised by close-based solution. The care2x community is such one. Different people have different understanding of "open source". Mine is that open source software is the technical way of developing software and free software based on GPL is the political and philosophical aspect of how software should be developed and used. Care2x is both open source software and free software. It is aimed to realise the idea to have healthcare software that can be affordable for use (better to say adoption) by any healthcare organisation. So, what about after all these explanations. I just want to say that the current state of the care2x software is direct mirror of the current state of the care2x community. It is the community that develops the software, it is the community that uses it, gives feedback and draws the direction of future progress. The project gives possibility to everyone to become part of the community and to affect the project in some direction. It is you (remember, you are part of this community) that have to drive the progress of the project. If you want to change something it will not happen if you just throw the request in the mailing list and then sit down and wait. There are no dedicated members in the community that are obliged to do this change. They will do it if they are convinced enough and they need this change, too. It is your responsibility to explain the idea for change in the best possible way, to find other people with same need and if in your possibility to help the developers in implementing the idea. You have the freedom to make the changes, but the freedom itself does nothing and worth nothing if you don't exploit it. There are lot of challenges in front of our community. May be the biggest one is that we are not consolidated. As I see there are lot of people from lot of different places, which naturally leads to different way of thinking. There are people that think about the community as something that they are not part of and that it will evolve and develop software without their help. This would probably happen, but in much slower rate. The more people realise that their small piece of contribution will help the project, the more the community will get stronger and will realise its goals. Let us change the discussion from the last 2-3 days in something more constructive. Let us think how to strengthen our community. I think that the current situation happens because the only way of communication at the moment is completely asynchronous - the communication is only through this mailing list. If we add additional channels of communication, especially real-life once, this will help us know each other better and to organise the work on the project in more productive way. Examples of such communication channels are chat rooms, web conferences, even face to face meetings in the future. Give your ideas for more! I think a good start about this is to schedule regular meeting in a mirc channel - one hour bi-weekly or monthly. At least this is an easy experiment to see if this helps. I will organise this in the next week or two. Now, I expect that you give your ideas. The community listens to you - this is for sure! Greetings Kaloyan _______________________________________________ Care2002-developers mailing list Care2002-developers@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/care2002-developers
