Hi Carola,
Dear All,
I have been reading all the posting from all the internacional community of openehr.
It is confusing at times and some clarity appears too.
My contribution is in regards to " Just to let you know my personal agenda 
I need to do this to encourage openEHR adoption here in South America"
And that’s a good start, but we all want to collaborate to get further adoption in public, private and education areas too.
The conflict of interest is when PERSONALLY this knowledge is used as a product to sell and make money transfer from a collective good without an aggremment.
At some point adoption means that someone has to do some work, and that work takes time of someones life, someone that has to eat, pay bills, etc. So money will be always involved in this kinds of things, these are the rules of the game… someone has to work and someone has to pay, and what is created in the middle should be something of value for many people, that’s the only sustainable approach I can think. I’ll be very happy if someone can think of something better, in the mean time I’ll keep working forward adoption with a sustainable approach.
I’ve talked a lot about the adoption problems of openEHR, and we always fall into the funding problem. And that’s a problem: we don’t have a sustainable approach to adoption.
For example, in Chile, a course was offered to the members with a cost, great beginning. I was very happy that THE ENCOURAGEMENT STARTED…however, the approach used last year confused the collective groups since at this side of the world (Chile) , the archetypes were introduced at the goverment level in 2006 by ocean informatics as a powerful tool of integration ( with a very different level of wisdom).
I think you know that I’ve created that course, and this is the first time I heard about any confusion. For the student recommendations (see my linkedin profile) and outputs we received (http://informatica-medica.blogspot.com/2012/01/conclusiones-del-curso-de-openehr-en.html) I don’t think they where confused at all, and ACHISA (http://achisa.org) members where very happy about that course adn they encourage me to give a second edition (what I’m doing right now, with a very good reception by students).
So, my recommendation for this area of developing countries is to provide some encouragement BUT always engaged with the wisdom first, meaning if we all want openehr to be successful ensure a strong collaboration at SELLING POINT, that is the add value of openehr. When a PERSONAL wish cross the collective good, there is room for error as expect but when previous work is not acknowledge in the same country, you will run to RESISTANT!!! that is what is happening in Latino America and Caribe.
Don’t take me wrong, but IMO you are confusing various concepts here, about what I want to do and how to do it. I think others (who know me, my work and how I work) don’t think the same way.
First of all, this is not a political discusion, is about what we need to do to get things done, and what resources we need to have that done.
Second, my personal intentions are meant for a collective good, as an example I take money from the course I gave, to create an openEHR portal in spanish, and I’ve done all the work to put it online (including software development, community management, etc…).
I also ask the openEHR community BEFORE doing anything, like the openEHR course, and everyone encourages it and I never receive any complain about it. As I see it, that’s a “declaration of intention”, and the community gave me their approval. I’m always willing to give everyone the guarantees they need.
Third, I’m always encouraging collaboration and doing things together, but in South America there is a resistances before start, the problem is the political part, not the technical, and I’m a technician trying to convince politicians.
And just to be clear: I don’t sell software: almost all my projects are open source, I don’t work for a company or organization: I’m an independent researcher & developer, from time to time I help companies to get things done, and I love to teach: bring what I learn to the community.
I would like to know the community opinions about this topic, as I don’t want to step in anyone’s shoe.
Kind regards,
Pablo.
Cheers Carol
IMIA LAC President,
PhD, Post Doc Health Informatics
Open source licenses are quite different beasts, and their combinations in projects is a nightmare. If you take licences seriously (which we’d better do), you can end up in some pretty frustrating situations, where you can use someone else’s code, but can’t distribute it with your work, etc etc.