The American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) Primary Care Informatics Working Group is seeking manuscripts to be submitted for the 2001 Fall Symposium. (For further details, see http://www.amia.org). Question: Is it worthwhile to try to present a panel on Collaborative and Open Development of Medical Software at AMIA? I can envision asking folks that are doing work to present summaries of progress: Alex Caldwell, who seems to be gathering momentum; perhaps some discussion from UCLA of the savings experienced in open source; Andrew po-jung Ho on his work; one of the GEHR fellows on their progress; Brian Bray or Joe dal Molin on the Canadian and European work they're doing; progress in collaborative development of VISTA; others that I don't know about... (Mary Kratz, are you still listening?) I am a mere spectator, but an interested one. And because I am an idiot, I might be willing to try to coordinate such a panel. The overall goal is to try to convince one or two people with discretionary authority who might be there to look into this further. The goal of the presentation is to make it seem real and viable, not to simply preach to the choir. If this is done, the first presentation will have to be an outline of how collaborative development is structured and why open code produces better coding practices and more reliable software, and why this benefits rather than threatens commercial software efforts. Anyone interested in going on the hook? Danl Johnson
