Thanks for bringing up the Open Source Practice Management Summit we
held last September.
It's purpose was to get all the groups working in this area together to
exchange information on what they are doing and find things "they can
steal from each other". I.E. Good ideas, source code, ...
One of the topics of discussion was what forum is the right one for
continuing and expanding this effort. Although the discussion was
short, we decided that AMIA was the right forum. In fact, we walked
away with the goal of getting an open source track in next years AMIA.
The main reason was that information exchange with the rest of the
medical informatics community would be "a good thing". This is two way
-- getting the open source message out there *and* learning from the
work of others so that our open source products can be better. Of
course if we are all in the same place at the same time, we'll learn
from each other and have a good time as well.
Going with an Open Source conference, such as O'Reilly, was also
discussed, but we seemed to have less in common with that group than
with AMIA. Also, we were aware of the upcoming AMIA agenda that
included several open source or near open source topics. The O'Reilly
conference tracks are by product (ie: Linux, Apache, Perl, Python, ...)
not by application area.
The option of hosting our own conference was considered premature.
I think we all felt that it was important to focus our efforts on a
single annual event. We can't really expect most volunteers to do more
than this.
However, picking a european conference to descend on was also felt to be
a good idea so we could cover more of the world.
I'd certainly like to participate. I think we need more than a panel
and I think it would be *very good* to have presentations from all the
major open source product groups out there. A one day "track" feels
about right to me.
Because of the volunteer nature of many of these projects, it may be
necessary to have some financial support for getting the key folks there
and registered -- particularly if the conference is expensive. I think
we should approach groups that stand to profit if we succeed (Red Hat,
VA Research, key OMG members, O'Reilly, Governments agencies, etc.) to
see what can be arranged.
We should see if the AMIA can discount their fees -- we are after all
bringing free software. If the fees are prohibitive, we could consider
having our own conference at around the same time and place so that we
have both an internal forum at low cost and the ability to interact with
AMIA members.
-Brian
"Daniel L. Johnson, MD" wrote:
>
> Well, actually Minoru, the host of this list, sponsored
> the first (annual?) open-source medical software conference
> in September, 1999. Perhaps this tradition could be
> continued. Joe and Brian, what is your view of this?
>
> Nevertheless, AMIA does offer a huge forum at which we
> stand a chance of engaging the interest and participation
> of others who do not yet know The One True Way (our way,
> of course), and so I would be sorry to abandon AMIA
> entirely despite its financially painful ticket price.
>
> Danl Johnson
