December 7th, 2008
Organizing the open source troops in healthcare
Ed Dodds (right) sends word that advocates of open source in healthcare IT have organized through LinkedIn and that their allies in the profession have gotten into the white paper game.
White papers are an important ingredient driving discussion among many IT customers. Always have been. So a paper explaining the benefits of open source to healthcare IT professionals is very welcome.
Which brings up an important point about open source.
Commercial software organizes its troops through user groups and developer groups and sales channels. It’s very efficient, and very vertical.
Open source is organized from the bottom up, and in a project’s early stages users are barely organized at all. Few users of The Gimp, even large users, have any organizational structure, while those of Adobe do.
That said, technology makes organizing motivated open source users very easy. What I’ve seen from Ed so far is a little use of LinkedIn, some tweets, some blog posts and an e-mail. It’s not too late to get this done.
There is an enormous incentive for those involved in open source healthcare IT to organize now. Decisions are about to be made that will either throw wide the door to open source in healthcare or, potentially, shut it for all time.
Now, in other words, is time for all good men (and women) in healthcare IT to come to the aid of the open source party.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist since 1978, and has covered technology since 1982. He launched the Interactive Age Daily, the first daily coverage of the Internet to launch with a magazine, in September 1994. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 12/08/08
