Hi,
At the CONNECT conference, Brian Behlendorf, Kolodner and several other
VA employees who might wish not to be named helped me get a 2 minute
audience with the CTO of the VA Peter Levin. We exchanged information and
agreed to email. The very fact that there is a CTO of all of the VA, rather
than just seperate departments is a huge development, this is a tacit
acknowledgement that the VA is a technology creating organization (what a
CTO does) rather than a technology managing organization (what a CIO does).
A few days later I sent him a typical (for me) rant, with about ten
links to the various things I have written about the VA and VistA. I told
him that I though the attempt to proprietary portions of the code was a bad
idea and that the centralization of the development of VistA (as opposed to
other VA IT functions) was a bad idea. If any of you have read my blog you
can have a pretty good idea of what I put in the email. I basically
complained about every failing of the VA that I have heard at the WorldVistA
or other FOSS conferences. I tried to have a more positive tone than my
standard over-inflammatory style at the prompting of Nancy (thanks for that)
and other more calming voices.
The response that I got back was amazing. He essentially said that he
agreed with many of my points, and even sent me some of his own writing that
correlates with some of the ideas in my letter. His one criticism was that I
was not -asking- for something that he could act on. He specifically asked
for a shorter actionable proposal to fix the problems between the VistA
community outside the central VA and the VistA community inside the central
VA.
So what do we want from the VA? I can think of several very specific
things that I might include in a response. I will throw them out here for
community comment and then send a letter based on the consensus (if there is
one) on the issue. Here is what I would like to see the VA do.
- Create a bridge-person: Create a role to interface between VistA-inside
and VistA-outside. Fill that role with someone who is capable of speaking
VistA and open source. Someone like Brian Behlendorf, a federal employee who
serves as the community manager for the CONNECT project. That person would
be expected to go to WorldVistA conferences etc etc and provide a face for
this collaboration.
- Overturn the moratorium of local VA hospital VistA development.
- Reinvest in local VA hospital VistA instances. Centrally managed
instances of VistA, with locally deployment. Flawed VistA modules from one
hospital should not take down the VistA instance of another hospital.
- Empower the bridge-person with a VistA Community Portal. That portal
should provide the following services:
- Allow for the submission of improved VistA components back into the
VA, to be evaluated as Class III code for possible adoption by local VA
hospitals.
- Those submissions should always be public unless they are security
issues, and then they should be made public immediately after being
confirmed-patched/denied-ignored
- Publish a list of approved licenses for contributing VistA
components back (probably from proprietary friendly licenses like Apache,
Mozilla, BSD, EPL etc etc, or just chose one if that is easier).
- Organizations that submit patches, or improvements should expect
that the bridge-person will publicly comment on reasons for
rejection for a
particular patch or software, fi the VA will not adopt the software.
- Have a feature request system, that is accessible only to groups who
are or represent live VistA instances outside the VA. This should include
local VA hospital programmers and CACS, people from IHS, representatives
from foreign organizations like Mexico and Jordan, and private hospitals
running VistA. This should provide a means for the community to give
feedback to the VA about the consequences of central VA development
decisions. However, this would not put the VA in the position of
accepting
feature requests from people who merely 'might' use VistA.
- The features and contributions should be analysed against the current
VA 'modernization' plan to create a new modernization plan that at least
partially considers the needs and contributions of outside-VA VistA users.
Note that this plan is far more conservative than what I have advocated in
the past.
http://www.fredtrotter.com/2008/04/18/what-do-about-the-va-crisis-the-aboveground-railroad/
I would call this a light-weight "open VistA community process". It does not
presume that the central VA should give up any control that they currently
hold. Rather, it just creates a formal means for the VA to be open about its
development decisions regarding VistA.
But I do not want to put something like this forward without taking comments
from the community.
Rather than have this debate on just Hardhats, I want to open it up to
everyone.
You can now comment on proposal using a co-ment instance (co-ment is the
successor to stet which was used to take comments on the GPlv3) that is
available through http://LibertyHSF.org
Regards,
-FT
--
Fred Trotter
http://www.fredtrotter.com
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