So, once again: I love standards. I wish standards to penetrate our domain thoroughly. But for standards to have any impact on evaluation of actually existing projects they would need to be more meaningful than what we have, and they definitely would need more acceptance than they currently have.
I think that Thomas wanted to distinguish between project with "nice implementation of usual state of the art" and projet that are pioneering for new functionnalities ; that's to say extending the state of the art.
Among the reasons why one decide to move to Open source, the ability to build de facto standard(s) is probably the best.
The "innovation" scale is orthogonal to the "release level" scale ; one for the present, one for the future, in the same way you can judge a country or a company both on its production figures or on its research capabilities.
I know people that think that there is a steady state of the art in the field of medical information systems ; they mean "we have all the standards we need ; its time to release widely" and see open source as a way to disseminate without the cost per unit barrier and with a level of quality witnessed by multi-team developpement and good auditability.
I am the kind of people that think that we are currently building a genuine new kind of information systems based on the "continuity of behavior" for a care team, concerning a given person (patient). Open source is a way to "have it happen" in a domain where standards are always 10 years late and venture capitalism doesn't come with the proper level of ethic.
So, inside Odyssee, the Episodus software is Stage 3 - a (more than 100 sites) but the new technology we are building is Stage 0
The main problem with an "innovation scale" is that it is hard to build (!).
Regards,
Philippe
