January 9th, 2009
HIMSS going open source?
Ed Dodds pointed me to this, and while it’s not a big story it’s a good indication of where we’re going.
HealthCareIT News, published by Medtech Publishing in partnership with the HIMSS trade group, has become a Drupal shop.
Drupal, an open source CMS with a commercial arm called Acquia, is a fine choice. In the interest of full disclosure I should add I have used Drupal since 2005 at Voic.Us, although ZDNet uses Wordpress.
This is newsworthy only because HIMSS itself is a collection of highly proprietary vendors. As I said in covering last year’s HIMSS show in Orlando, it looked like nothing so much as a 1986 Comdex. That was not meant as a compliment.
HIMSS members are licking their lips over news that healthcare IT will be an important part of health reform, and is burrowing its proprietary advocates up-and-down K Street.
But to build community it’s going open source.
What does it mean when a proprietary organization launches a site driven by open source? Not always much. All sorts of sites use Drupal, including entertainment companies building proprietary community databases.
HealthcareIT says its Drupal installation will let it build a new “reader community,” a welcome form of interaction I have become well familiar with over the last several years. Congratulations.
The real question on these things isn’t whether you’re taking feedback, but how you’re responding to it, and whether you’re letting yourself be steered by it or seeking to steer it yourself.
We’ll see what it is in this case.
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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