Re: openEHR community on Google Wave

[Thomas Beale <thomas.beale@oceaninformatics.com>]

Erik Sundvall wrote:

Thanks Sebastian!

You nicely adressed most of my concerns and seem to understand the problems.

Tom & Sam: In this thread on Nov 17 I wrote "Many people start problem
solving by a using a search engine, so that the discussions need to be
publicly available for reading without login". That seems to be the
point you missed but Sebastian understood. Thanks Sebastian!
  

well true to some extent, but once you have a vague idea of the commnity or location where 'real answers' are, you don't bother with google search any more, you go to that place. I don't use google to search Medline, or wikipedia, or he UK Jobseeker/employer database, or any online store, or anything else that has its own internal logic; the only thing I might use google for is to find those places in the first instance.

Note that i am not against *in principle* public access of anything on CKM - it is just that to be practically useful, google isn't going to provide a useful way to query its contents.

Tom: If you already know where to look then you have done half the
job, I tried to adress the problem of not knowing where to look (e.g.
questions like "is there any openEHR work regarding deafness"). Tom
  

well I would start with openEHR.org, just as I would start with the Dell site if I wanted to buy a Dell computer. I might use google to find these sites, but then I would stop using google, and use what those sites had to offer me.

you are probably one of the few people that actually know exactly
where to look for any thinkable openEHR thing, but you are an
exception ;-) (In a positve sense.)

Tom wrote:
  

We have robots turned off for all SVN repositories, including the one that used to
hold all the archetypes.
    

Once upon a time not even the specifications were searchable, that was
easily solved by copying releases to a web directory
  

I suppose that is true as well, but I must admit, if I was looking for something in an openEHR spec, I would run the search on openEHR.org, not google, or any other generic search engine.

Re: the other issues about governance etc - openEHR is currently an unfunded volunteer organisation. The board is looking at ways to get it to a more financially stable situation. This would likely involve improvements to governance, making sure that the committee structure was representative according to more formal rules. I am all for this. The current situation can be considered somewhere along the continuum of an early small project group (from the GEHR days) to a fully open and funded open standards/source organisation, a point we have yet to arrive at. The lack of funding remains a problem, and needs to be solved. Nothing comes for free, certainly not 1100 pages of tested EHR specifications, some 100,000s lines of open source code etc, and with the growing number of users around the world, ways need to be found to make openEHR financially viable, just like any other .org, charity or similar non-profit organisation. I see part of the responsibility for solving this as being on the community - if it has value to you, then consider ways in which funding could be achieved that will work. One method that won't work is charging for standards - which stops many ISO standards being used. But a model has to be found - proposals from anyone are welcome.

- thomas beale