If I were to sum up my vision of OSHCA in one line it would be: A forum to get together and create open source health care projects. I see it's main function is to provide a meeting place for users and developers to form consortia on a large enough scale to launch open source initiatives with enough "critical mass" to dominate their markets. Tactically, I think that the best way for OSHCA to accomplish such a mission would be through in-person meetings and a directory of interested parties. I see the group as primarily focussed on business and not technical issues. I don't see the group as a whole promoting any particular project, standard, or technology. One characteristic of successful open source projects is the users of the technology and its developers are one and the same. On an individual scale, it's possible to just start a project with the hope that others will join in to the extent required to succeed. At the scale of an organization, such as a hospital or a health network, it's unthinkable to start a project without enough resources to complete it. This chicken and egg problem is a barrier to wider adoption of the open source approach. OSHCA can solve this by providing a forum where folks interested in a particular application area can get together to pool resources and distribute risk. Imagine our progress if every organization buying proprietary software contributed just 5% of it's costs to projects to develop open source alternatives. Such a policy would lead to massive cost reductions over the long term. On the developer side, open source code is typically written by individuals, small companies, or research groups. Here too, pooling resources is one way to tackle larger projects and compete effectively against entrenched proprietary alternatives. In this view, OSHCA is *not*: - an architecture - a project index - the openhealth list - a development project - a standards body - a web site -Brian
