Christian Heller, author of resmedicinae and myself are willing to submit a proposal to get funding by the European Union in the IST program. To give you more explanation, let me quote Yves Pandaveine: "Subject: projects funded by the European Commission in 1999 De : Yves Paindaveine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> (Tel 68548) Although not directly related to open source, the European Commission funds projects in the domain of health IT and some of the results of the projects are required to be public. The following projects started in 1999 and their fact sheets are now online at http://www.cordis.lu/ist/ka1/health/projects.htm. Given the audience of this list, it might be worthwhile to clarify what I have been mentioning. In short, the Commission is a kind of executive government empowered by 15 European countries (or Member States viz. France, Germany, Italy, Spain, ...) as formulated in a Treaty (the last version of this treaty is dubbed the Treaty of Amsterdam) to carry out several activities, among which R&D. We act more or less like DARPA: publication of our R&D priorities in an annual work programme, call for proposals, evaluation of proposals, negotiation, funding of the projects and follow-up. The Information Society Technology (IST) programme is a part of a $15 billion R&D programme over 4 years (1998-2002) called 5th Framework Programme. More can be found on http://www.cordis.lu �As another example, pure clinical research is mostly carried out in another programme: the quality of life and life science (QoL) programme. Participation to these R&D programmes is open to partners from all countries. However, only partners from European countries and associated states are entitled to receive funding from the Commission (http://www.cordis.lu/fp5/src/3rdcountries.htm). In some cases, a national mechanism (such as in Switzerland through the ministry of education, or in Argentina) has been foreseen to fund their national participating organisations once a proposal has been retained by the Commission (http://www.cordis.lu/inco2/src/research.htm#iii). Well, and open source is part of the priorities of the IST programme as can be read from http://www.cordis.lu/ist/istag.htm and other official speeches." The deadline is short (tomorrow or something like that) but still we can try to finish something. Here is a call for interest and help, especially, but not restsicted to European citizen, affiliated to European companies and institutions (again this is not a direct or too restrictive limitation) Where are we now: We want to capitalize on an existing project, for example Resmedicinae (see http://www.resmedicinae.org/) or another like FreePM (see http://www.freepm.org) or GnuMed (see http://www.gnumed.org) or OpenEMed (see http://telemed.lanl.gov/OpenEMed) We have an experience of European funded projects We can get the implication of the IT director of a large public hospital in Brussels, that is attached to a University (University funding is 100%) We have good contacts with European MD who could sign in. Most of the past few weeks we've spent in investigating on several projects and standards. A very useful link is www.omg.org/homepages/corbamed One promising project in my mind is OpenEMed which is run by an American University and their governement. It uses latest technology such as CORBA, EJBs, XML etc. Perhaps a cooperation would be possible... We've got some emails from interested people all over Europe and USA/Canada. We guess, we could get about 5 co-workers at the beginning and later-on 10 and more. But nothing concrete yet; we'd need to give them tasks first. Well, as most OSS developers we did what weI did as a hobby besides our "real" job in life. So we couldn't do a lot yet. This is why a complimentary funding woild help go further. We need at least 2-3 participating countries of only within the EU. PLEASE interested European people answer personnally quickly, sending your email AND telephone number. All other parties are welcome to show support. They could also get some support but less ! Thank you for your interest. Best regards, Nicolas -- Nicolas Pettiaux Avenue du P�rou 29 - B-1000 Bruxelles Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
