Erik,
a few points informally (I am not on any boards of any organisations, so
these are my own thoughts):
* any organisation like openEHR needs some core paid people to
execute key functions, and to maintain continuity. There is an
'officers' level, which runs any organisations, including admin
and other support staff, and there is an operational level.
* for the operational level, there are typically posts like CTO,
CMO, infrastructure management, project coordination, and so on.
If the organisation is to do properly what its members want -
typically 2 things: a) manage specifications/standards, including
member involvement in this, and b) manage open source projects,
potentially largely staffed by volunteers - then it has to have a
few dedicated posts. Otherwise it becomes no-one's responsibility
to actually coordinate things, keep infrastructure running etc.
* currently openEHR Foundation pays no-one. Therefore, all attempts
at the above work are performed by people on the payrolls of other
organisations, each having their own raison d'?tre and agenda.
Compare this with IHTSDO, HL7, CEN, OASIS, Linux.org, Apache.org
etc - they all have core paid posts to enable the organisation to
do its work.
* if we say that openEHR (for some odd reason) should not try to get
funding for such posts, but it would be ok to get time instead,
then all we are saying is that some other organisation(s) should
essentially loan people to the Foundation to do this work and pick
up the cost. This is equivalent to them just paying that amount of
money into the organisation. There may be tax benefits, but
otherwise the basic argument does not change.
* If on the other hand, other orgs provide some of their people,
some of the time, for limited periods, to do specific tasks on
projects, this is inevitably because it is in that organisation's
interest to do so. Many orgs, like the NHS, VHA, as well as
universities, do this already. But these people aren't performing
core Foundation work, they are trying to execute some project on
their own agenda. So this doesn't actually help the Foundation get
more organised.
* as far as I can see, the wide experience in non-profit orgs of any
kind shows that core paid posts (whether by direct funding or
other means) are essential for good functioning.
The only thing to understand about Ocean is that (10 years ago) it
didn't decide to work in the Java space, which is the natural
environment of open source these days. In the ICT industry today, there
might be 1/3 of all companies oriented to Java (1/3 .Net, 1/3 everything
else), and of that fraction, maybe 10-20% making their source code
openly available. Ocean doesn't happen to be in that demographic, along
with probably 80% of all companies in ICT (and health ICT). Ocean's
mission is therefore not to build open source Java implementations of
anything. Nevertheless, Ocean has donated significant time to openEHR
specification projects, open sourced/ing its subsequent specification
work, and open sourced 2 key tools (which incidentally attract no
external coder activity, proving the point that if it isn't Java, PHP,
Python etc, it is not seen as open source). I don't think there are any
commercial archetype editors at all.
If we look at where the main implementation work that has been done open
source, and in Java, the bulk came from Rong's original (small!) company
A-code, and since then Cambio has financed his further efforts. This
work, like the specification work, was significant, and as far as I
know, never reimbursed - it was done because the relevant people thought
it was a useful thing to do. Significant additions have since been done
to the EHR Java code base, including by Zilics, a Brazilian company with
a commercial openEHR implementation, other Brazilian companies, Ocean,
as well as many universities, including CHIME, Link?ping, and many
others (the proper list visible on SVN of course). Likewise to the Java
tool base, including Link?ping's archetype editor, no longer currently
maintained.
I can't answer for CHIME specifically, but universities are of course
100% welcome to put as much time as they want in some openEHR-related
activity, and that is certainly happening. The CHIME Opereffa project is
specifically an open source reference implementation built on Rong's
earlier platform. With more resources, this project could certainly make
faster progress. But with everyone working on their own main job (PhD,
company project, lecturing etc), today it is done just with little
pieces of time as they are available. There is really no avoiding the
problem of funding here: no matter whether it is done on the openEHR
side, or by some other organisation, it just costs money for dedicated
analyst/architect/developer time.
The blockers are, in my view: the unfunded central posts (preventing
efficient organisation, management and maintenance), and the dire
e-health standards situation, where none of the official standards
adequately address the EHR space, but adopters in general feel unable to
easily embrace non de jure work like openEHR (preventing more widespread
'customer' uptake).
The openEHR/IHTSDO dialogue is partly to address these questions. We can
hope that it produces a result, since it is clear that the industry is
not happy with the status quo.
- thomas
On 15/11/2010 13:58, Erik Sundvall wrote:
> 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
>
> _______________________________________________
> openEHR-technical mailing list
> openEHR-technical at openehr.org
> http://lists.chime.ucl.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/openehr-technical
>
--
Ocean Informatics *Thomas Beale
Chief Technology Officer, Ocean Informatics
<http://www.oceaninformatics.com/>*
Chair Architectural Review Board, /open/EHR Foundation
<http://www.openehr.org/>
Honorary Research Fellow, University College London
<http://www.chime.ucl.ac.uk/>
Chartered IT Professional Fellow, BCS, British Computer Society
<http://www.bcs.org.uk/>
Health IT blog <http://www.wolandscat.net/>
*
*
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