Hi Erik, > 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.
Also, there are a lot of people working with openEHR with no payment at all, and the difficulties of having to study the specs, and little tooling and open projects that are not updated with some frequency. That was the whole point of the discution. There were a lot of people that start working with openEHR, but the cost of understand the specifications, trying software (incomplete or not updated), and the complexity of building something based on openEHR that realy works, just discourages people. And we need to do something to change this reality (if we want openEHR be widely adopted). > > 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. Is just people (like us) that works with openEHR. > > 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. We need people that update the tools and software projects with some regularity. Yes, it's working hours, that must be payed some way... not everyone works on a university that pays people to investigate on openEHR. > > 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. Not every organization can do this. The reality in here in South America is very diferent to the one you mention. There are things that simply cannot be made without funding, in the other hand, we can't wait to see when openEHR is got to be widely adopted, so I start this discution to see: 1. where are we going? 2. is it worth to invest my free time in this standard or I have to look elsewhere? > > 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. > I agree. > > 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.) > Not everyone that is investing free time on openER works in a company that can made some kind of profit. > 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 > > _______________________________________________ > openEHR-technical mailing list > openEHR-technical at openehr.org > http://lists.chime.ucl.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/openehr-technical -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.openehr.org/mailman/private/openehr-technical_lists.openehr.org/attachments/20101115/8645465f/attachment.html>
