Hi! On Fri, Nov 5, 2010 at 10:03, Thomas Beale <thomas.beale at oceaninformatics.com> wrote: > there are zero paid openEHR people, full-time or part-time.
That is not such a useful way of looking at openEHR funding. There are a lot of people working with openEHR on paid time during working hours. They are just not funded by the openEHR foundation. This situation is the same for many open source projects etc. If you define "openEHR people" as people funded by the foundation you are automatically excluding most of the community from being "openEHR people". That might not be the smartest thing to do. Too often I hear "openEHR needs funding" with the accompanying thought that the foundation itself needs a lot of money. Yes the foundation might need a little money for server & maintenance costs (if we don't want to use "free" services) and for trademark registrations etc. But the real need is working hours, not money. Certain organisational behaviours make people and companies donate working time, while other behaviours do the opposite. Some behaviours get the time donations ending up within the original project, other behaviours result in related projects more using and indirectly contributing to the project via related but organisationally independent projects. Many other volunteer organisations understand this difference better than what the openEHR foundation seems to do, at least judging from the few signals one can receive from the not-so-community-present foundation board that has nobody to formally answer to but themselves. In a volunteer project it can be quite OK with natural self appointed leaders, often the founders, but it then has to be matched with other attitudes or safeguards such as... - being very good at communicating and willing to actively explain and discuss decisions - the ability for any participant to branch of and take (a copy) of invested time (work) with them, if the leadership becomes poor ...and so on. > The people who > currently put some effort into openEHR, such as myself, are working on > exactly the same basis as anyone else in the community. We are just crazy > enough to spend more time on it;-) There are a lot of completely sane reasons for investing time in openEHR. I for example believe Ocean Informatics would not at all have been getting assignments all around the globe if it had not chosen to invest time in open specifications. Very few would have heard of that little Australian company. (On the other hand, it could probably have been an even bigger company if everybody, not just a few, within that company understood open source business models better.) To get back to the real issue of "slow" openEHR adoption, I believe Seref is closest to the problem: a system trying to do everything openEHR tries to in a well engineered way, really becomes an "elephant". It takes time to properly implement an elephant from scratch, especially including all supporting systems. The two organisations that could have provided a real working open implementation of that elephant first would probably have been UCL and Ocean Informatics. Now, instead of joining forces on that, they have both been running their own competing commercial closed source implementation projects (OK UCLs were probably more 13606 than openEHR, but you get the point). They are of course both fully entitled to do so, and it's great that the specifications themselves are open, but I believe it has delayed the arrival of an open demonstrator platform that people can use to try openEHR ideas on and are willing to invest time in. On the other hand it has left the field completely open for both competing commercial and open source efforts, which in the long run, after this delay, might show to be beneficial for the world at large (but probably less beneficial for Ocean and UCL than it could have been). UCL by the help of Seref and whoever supports him, now seem to be getting the point of an open demonstrator, so things seem to be changing there. One should not deny that there might be a similar competition between open source efforts, but I believe cross-pollination of ideas between such projects can be pretty fruitful and efficient (look at Archetype editors for example), and thus less effort might be wasted than in commercial competition. (To add to the open source confusion some of us are thinking of alternative ways (http REST) to slice the elephant implementation and let smaller parts cooperate (or compete if you wish) in implementations - but that should be a separate post later.) I hope this mail did not sound too complaining, I more aimed at explaining (from my particular point of view). I like both UCL- and Ocean-people, that's one reason to try and be honest with them. :-) Best regards, Erik Sundvall erik.sundvall at liu.se http://www.imt.liu.se/~erisu/? Tel: +46-13-286733
