In view of thsi comment, with apologies to John Gage and Greg Kreis, I
would like to revoke my suggestion to go to O'reilly.
I agree that we should ride on to the AMIA meeting.
Do we have any high ranking AMIA person in the list who can "corner" a
significant amount of room-time space for the alliance?
Alvin
On Fri, 7 Jan 2000, Brian Bray wrote:
> 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
>
