openEHR community on Google Wave

Clinical (archive)
1

For anyone who is interested and has a Google Wave account, I have started an openEHR community Wave with the intent of it being a coordinating point - which we can use as a jumping off point to various conversations or waves on specific topics or projects. This may work, or it may result in total chaos - I don’t know :wink:

From this first wave I have set up two linked waves to kick it off - one for clinical modelling, particularly with trying to start to communicate and coordinate early archetype efforts, so that resources and efforts might be shared and enhanced rather than duplicated. It will no doubt evolve where the community wants to take it.

I have set up an additional wave that can kickstart technical waves - I won’t presume to suggest topics there. And anyone can add others as they see a need - the wave is totally open & public, so all can contribute and shape it.

I certainly don’t see this as conflicting to the current openEHR wiki nor to the lists. It is a different kind of medium - where IM, email and wiki overlap to achieve specific collaborative tasks, or to explore particular issues before recording/reporting them back to wiki or email list etc. We can make it what we want.

It has been interesting to explore uses for Wave. I have been using it to collaborate on some of the CKM direction with Ian McNicoll and Sebastian Garde - there are situations where it has helped us communicate when these other mediums haven’t been able to.

And I’m also collaborating with clinicians in other countries re some content definitions and teasing out issues. In fact started one conversation on Twitter with a couple of pharmacists - one from UK and the other from US - re allergies. The US pharmacist put it into a blog to try to pull it together cohesively (http://bit.ly/4EV0uw) and then we ended up thrashing out many points in detail and in context via a private Google Wave - an interesting and useful experience.

For those who are interested and would like to participate, the openEHR community wave is http://bit.ly/2unchr - invite all your friends.

The Complete Guide to Google Wave is a useful resource - http://completewaveguide.com/

Regards

Heather

2

Hi!

Google Wave is very interesting, but not yet very widespread. I think
Wave can be a good tool for openEHR.

Could you please make sure that the OpenEHR-related wave-discussions
of public interest get copied to a more common and search-engine
freindly format too as soon as possible. (There are Google Wave
robots/bots that can be added to a wave in order to automatically copy
the wave content to e.g. blog format.)

Otherwise you are again moving conversations from public searceable
space to restricted private space, just like with discussions moved
from open searchable wikis/mailinglists to the CKM. That is a very bad
thing for an open project. Many people start problem solving by a
using a search engine, so the discussions need to be publicly
available for reading without login. Currently you get good openEHR
search engine results from the specifications, mailing list archives,
wiki and openEHR web, but most likely not from CKM or wave.

Best regards,
Erik Sundvall
erik.sundvall@liu.se http://www.imt.liu.se/~erisu/ Tel: +46-13-286733
(Mail & tel. recently changed, so please update your contact lists.)

3

Hi Erik,

This is a very important point. I agree entirely. The aim of the Wave project is wholly around working up some early drafts of possible archetypes. As such, this is really a new sort of activity which, in the past would tended to have been done by individuals or projects in isolation. It is not the sort of work that would ever have appeared on the lists in any case. Having said that, I would hope to feed back progress to the non-Wave community, especially if more general issues arise that would be of interest to the community. I will investigate the blog-feed addons you suggested.

The number of Wave participants does now seem to be rising very rapidly and I would hope that if anyone wants to participate in the Wave ‘experiment’, that we should be able to get an invitation to them before too long. Certainly I still have a couple of invitations to hand-out if anyone would like to take part. I hope to get things started later this week.

Fair point, though. For the moment we must ensure that we are not inadvertantly creating ‘private’ discussions, which is entirely contra to the purpose of using Wave in the first place!! The philosophy is to encourage collaboration at a very early stage so that overlapping and contradictory models/requirements can be rationalised before different groups have invested too much time and energy.

Share early, share often.

Dr Ian McNicoll
office / fax +44(0)141 560 4657
mobile +44 (0)775 209 7859
skype ianmcnicoll
ian.mcnicoll@oceaninformatics.com
ian@mcmi.co.uk

Clinical Analyst Ocean Informatics openEHR Archetype Editorial Group
Member BCS Primary Health Care SG Group www.phcsg.org / BCS Health Scotland

2009/11/17 Erik Sundvall <erik.sundvall@liu.se>

4

Hi Heather,

How can we sign in to this Google wave? The access is restricted.

Cheers,

Stef

5

Seconded Here...

6

Hi Stef,

Do you have a Google Wave account? The openEHR community wave is itself public but you do need a Google Wave account to get in at all.

Ian

Dr Ian McNicoll
office / fax +44(0)141 560 4657
mobile +44 (0)775 209 7859
skype ianmcnicoll
ian.mcnicoll@oceaninformatics.com
ian@mcmi.co.uk

Clinical Analyst Ocean Informatics openEHR Archetype Editorial Group
Member BCS Primary Health Care SG Group www.phcsg.org / BCS Health Scotland

2009/11/17 Stef Verlinden <stef@vivici.nl>

7

Signing on to Google wave:

The way I did:
I clicked on the link provided in the first post of this thread and it opened the google wave for me. I clicked on the “follow” button to receive the wave contents on my wave inbox.

If you do not have a Wave account, I suggest you sign up for an invitation from the Google wave webpage here:

https://wave.google.com/wave/

Hope this helps,
Arin

8

I have some google wave invitations if anyone needs one

Pauline

07932 661678

9

Hi everyone,

As a point of clarification, this is just an initiative started by me, rightly or wrongly, by myself and with no official consultation. This is not a formal openEHR Foundation activity, so all flack can be directed back to me. If I have caused any confusion, I apologise. I’m just enthusiastic and interested to further explore the potential (or not) offered by Google Wave.

The Wave itself (and now with a few additional subWaves) is open to the public. That said, the extent of public involvement is currently limited to those who have been able to get themselves a Google Wave account, but this will grow over time as the whole Wave platform gains momentum. So if you are interested, beg, borrow or steal an invitation from colleagues or friends.

While these initial ‘coordinating waves’ are public, small groups may go off and use a private Wave to work on a task or project - just like they do now using email, skype or IM. The result should be identical - submitting the draft archetype to CKM or contributing to the email lists or wiki. I see Google Wave as just another optional vehicle for sharing ideas - no more. I am certainly not suggesting that we change anything about the way that the openEHR current communication strategies through website, wiki and email lists.

One of my main interests in Wave has been the need for us to design an archetype sandpit or nursery - a collaborative space in which anyone can start to link up with others, share resources and support each other in the design and creation of draft archetypes for submission into the CKM review process. As soon as I heard about Google Wave, it sounded like it was trying to achieve a similar thing. So I’ve been waiting with bated breath. And my conclusion so far it that the Wave functionality is very much the kind of thing I had envisaged as the ultimate ‘CKM sandbox’. Now there are also possibilities to have federations of Wave servers… how that may or may not fit into CKM design is yet to be determined, but worth investigating.

Interestingly there are a number of people who have joined the Waves and left messages of interest who I have not seen submitting emails on these lists - so perhaps there are potential members of the openEHR community that we can tap into using these other media.

Hope this clarifies

I have given all my Google Wave invitations away, and I know Ian had some - not sure if this is still the case. Perhaps others on these lists might offer some to others thru the list if they have some spares…

Kind regards

Heather

10

Hi all,

I still have five wave invitations left if anyone else needs one.

Heather, I think one of the advantages of the wave is that is much less daunting to jump into than the CKM environment.

A disadvantage that we have already found in playing around with it is that it can very quickly become fragmented, disjointed, messy or long. Users will need to be fairly rigorous about keeping the sandpit neatly raked :slight_smile:

Kind regards

Pauline

+44 7932 661 678

11

Hi!

If I have caused any confusion, I apologise. I'm just enthusiastic and
interested to further explore the potential (or not) offered by Google
Wave.

It is a very nice initiative Heather and there is no need to
apologise, just a need to get the discussions out in open public
searchable space (and that also goes for the currently unsearchable
CKM).

I believe that in a set of properly managed wave conversations it
might be easier to follow the discussion flow, and it might be a less
fragmented user experience than the current CKM is. If done right and
when there are more wave providers than Google (since wave uses a
truly open protocol) then we could at the same time get rid of the
current CKM vendor lock-in and extension limitations (without creating
another vendor lock in).

While these initial 'coordinating waves' are public, small groups may go off
and use a private Wave to work on a task or project - just like they do now
using email, skype or IM.

Yes of course some conversations (or parts of conversations) will
always be private since humans prefer to work that way sometimes. The
problem is if things are inaccessible and unsearchable even when there
is no intention to keep the discussion private.

The result should be identical - submitting the
draft archetype to CKM or contributing to the email lists or wiki.

If wave-based tools become widespread and powerful enough to do
openEHR review, voting etc., then I don't see CKM as a necessary step
in the pipeline to finally submitting archetypes/templates to simple
stable repositories. Every shift of tools along the way adds a
potential user confusion.

By the way, have you tried using mindmapping gadgets for openEHR
related development in wave, I found an open source mindmapping gadget
that even includes a voting mechanism and freemind-import facilities
at:
http://wave-samples-gallery.appspot.com/about_app?app_id=64007
See also: http://www.brucecooper.net/2009/11/mind-map-gadget-for-google-wave.html
And since the mindmapping gadget is open source it could easily be
modified by any java/GWT developer to add features that you'd find
useful for openEHR related use :slight_smile:

Best regards,
Erik Sundvall
erik.sundvall@liu.se http://www.imt.liu.se/~erisu/ Tel: +46-13-286733
(Mail & tel. recently changed, so please update your contact lists.)

P.s. To add voting to suitable items (e.g. corresponding to when you
use voting in CKM) it seems like
http://wave-samples-gallery.appspot.com/about_app?app_id=23006 might
be useful. I guess a proper discussion will often solve things without
the need for voting though...

12

Hi Erik
Can you tell me what search capabilities you want in CKM that are not there.
You can export a protégé ontology, all the archetypes and have all the
search power we have thought of from the asset management platform.
Unsearchable seems a little unfair.
Cheers, Sam

13

Hi Sam!

Hi Erik
Can you tell me what search capabilities you want in CKM that are not there.
You can export a protégé ontology, all the archetypes and have all the
search power we have thought of from the asset management platform.
Unsearchable seems a little unfair.

If you read my CKM-search-reasoning in other related messages
carefully again you will see that I have been talking about the CKM
not being searchable via major search engines (like Google Search)
hence the wording "open public searchable space".

The problem is that the CKM content currently is "locked in" behind
passwords and a search-engine-unfriendly application structure so that
the content is not a proper part of the "web" that search engine
spiders can index. This is a fairly simple technical publishing
problem that can be solved if there is a will from the ones owning the
CKM application. A more serious meta-problem is if the
search-engine-unfriendliness is not seen as a problem by the
application owners and by the foundation using the application.

The wiki and mailinglists (via archives) do not suffer from this
searchability problem, they were built with openness in mind and are
fully searchable and any discussion regarding certain archetypes in
them etc will be found. An extra plus is that their content can also
be archived by sites like http://www.archive.org

In openEHR we are often talking about the value of capturing clinical
context in order to interpret data, as a thought-experiment try to
apply the same thinking regarding archetype development. You (and your
search queries) might want to see the context of discussion and the
review comments for archetypes, not just the final archetypes.

Best regards,
Erik Sundvall
erik.sundvall@liu.se http://www.imt.liu.se/~erisu/ Tel: +46-13-286733
(Mail & tel. recently changed, so please update your contact lists.)

14

I am not sure what use having search engines seeing into the CKM is. We have robots turned off for all SVN repositories, including the one that used to hold all the archetypes. Search engines only tell you about things you did not already know about; whether they could report anything coherent from CKM I am not sure, same as for all the source code in the SVN repositories. Or are you suggesting we make all that searchable as well (it kills performance by the way).

Google or any other search engine doesn’t know how to search CKM in an intelligent fashion…but if you go into CKM, which is fully open, you can see everything. I am unclear on the problem.

  • thomas beale

Erik Sundvall wrote:

(attachments)

OceanCsmall.png

15

Hi All,

I don't understand how the terms "vendor lock-in", "behind doors" etc. are associated with Ocean - I see it as a social service organisation rather than a commercial entity by the way :stuck_out_tongue:

Interesting times :wink: Though I am hoping that we can identify the underlying reasons why some of us got so much sensitized and discuss this openly...

Cheers,

-koray

16

Hi,

I think a couple of things could be changed to make CKM more search-friendly, but I also think we have to look carefully what we want and where:

  • The idea behind linking comments/discussions directly to an archetype and not just using a mailing list or the like is that we want comments for an archetype gathered in one place so that they are in fact easier accessible than via common search engines.
    I certainly felt that a lot of discussions were repeated on the mailing lists, because nobody could remember that the question had been asked for that archetype already.
    However, currently it is only possible to search comments for a certain archetype and we may want to search for comments of all archetypes (because we know what we are searching for, but not exactly for which archetype it may have been posted).

  • All new comments are already available by a news feed you just need to subscribe to as well as on the Dashboard. Also you can select to get email notifications on any new comment (or comments for a specific archetype or comment for a specific thread of comments.)
    There are probably tools to take a newsfeed and post the contents somewhere for anybody who likes to do this.
    However, there may be additional value to automatically post the comments to somewhere where they are indexable from google etc. This e.g. could be another openEHR mailing list that receives all new comments.

  • We could also make the comments available without having to log in to CKM if people feel strongly about this.
    Then only if you want to post a new comment you need to log in and probably only access the commenters’ profiles once logged in as well.

  • With regard to archetype reviews, I am not so sure if they should be accessible without even logging in.
    Neither I am sure if there is value in having them indexed by search engines. I strongly believe that they need to be structured and displayed in an archetype-specific way and groupable by review rounds, directly linked to the way the archetype looked liked at that stage of the review process, etc. to be useful. Everybody can access all reviews in CKM (when logged in), while reviewers can choose to be anonymous (and only reveal their identity to other members of the review team). Certainly the CKM approach is more open than any HL7 (or the like) process I have seen. Everybody can access it and everybody who wants to can participate.

  • With regards to archetypes, you can download all of them or a selection of them. There are webservices to access them, and a couple more are going to be added in the next release as discussed on the wiki and wave. And if there is need for more, we can always add them

  • When google wave is out of beta and open to everybody, we will certainly explore how we can make use of it, integrated in CKM and/or as a starting point for archetype development, etc.
    Regards
    Sebastian

17

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!

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
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 :wink: (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

Koray: you said "Ocean - I see it as a social service organisation
rather than a commercial entity by the way :P"

That view is not completely shared everywhere. I agree that Ocean
Informatics contributes tremendously to openEHR. Leading, starting and
contributing to open projects is nowadays something many commercial
companies do including gigants like IBM and Sun. The reason is not
just altruistic, rather it is bothe a kind of efficient marketing of
other related services and a way of tapping in to a wider community of
resources in a way benefiting all involved parties. How to do this
open/commercial mix in a good way is really not easy, Sun has for
example had some problems with this.

Koray, the "behind doors"-thing I think regard e.g. the widely
circulating rumours that the OpenEHR-fondation and/or Ocean has
invited some organisations and/or companies to a meeting regarding the
"commersialisation of openEHR" or something and possibly to the fact
that the Foundation Board seems only accountable to itself. I don't
really know exactly what different people know or think, but I agree
that a discussion would be valuable. But the discussion is neither
technical or clinical so I'll try to stop abusing these lists for that
purpose and have started a wiki page at:

The openEHR community is wonderful and contributions from companies,
organisations, universities etc. are fantastic. I am sure that
potential tensions can be solved and misunderstandings can be cleared
if discussed openly. (On the wikipage maybe?) I also understand that
there are real issues regarding funding that need to be solved, and
hope that the whole community will sooner or later be entrusted to
listen in to and contribute to those discussions.

Best regards,
Erik Sundvall
erik.sundvall@liu.se http://www.imt.liu.se/~erisu/ Tel: +46-13-286733
(Mail & tel. recently changed, so please update your contact lists.)

P.s. to Sebastian regarding archetype reviews: yes they would be
better presented together with the context they were written in, so
I'd suggest that such a view would showing them in context could be
created and being the one exposed to search engines, not every comment
as an individual page.

18

Link to the wiki page?

19

Hi!

Sebastian, you nicely addressed most of my concerns and seem to
understand the problem.

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

If you already know where to look then you have already done half the
job, I tried to address the problem of not knowing where to look (e.g.
questions like "is there any openEHR work regarding deafness", such
search results should also include content from CKM discussions).

Tom 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 positive sense) and will seldom be the basis of a
standard use-case :wink:

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 since
they only were in the indexing-blocked SVN, that was really bad, but
it was easily solved by copying releases to a indexable web server
directory.

Koray: Regarding Ocean as a "social service organisation", closed
doors etc, I agree that would be valuable to discuss, but the
discussion is neither technical or clinical so I'll try to stop
abusing these lists for that purpose and have started a wiki page for
the topic at:
http://www.openehr.org/wiki/display/oecom/openEHR+transparency
(Those that want that discussion in the inbox can subscribe to changes
on that page. I'll post something next week but others might post
something before me.)

Best regards,
Erik Sundvall
erik.sundvall@liu.se http://www.imt.liu.se/~erisu/ Tel: +46-13-286733
(Mail & tel. recently changed, so please update your contact lists.)

P.s.
Sebastian: Regarding archetype reviews, yes they would be better
presented together with the context they were written in, so I'd
suggest that such a view would showing them in context could be
created and being the one exposed to search engines, there is no point
in publishing every comment as an separate page.

Tom and other programmers: Yes, it would be nice to republish at least
the completed releases from sourcecode repositories too (in a
indexable way) if the SVN server can't take the load directly. Try
searching for "openehr" on http://www.google.com/codesearch - it will
mostly show results not hosted by openehr.org (and some old defunct
now blocked links from openehr.org). It even searches and nicely
displays contents of zip-files with code, it identifies programming
language, licence type etc. A wonderful tool that openehr.org
currently has opted out from. (It even found cached code from your old
now taken-over domain Deepthought. That's an example archiving service
as I mentioned earlier as a positive thing with being indexable.)

20

Sorry about multiple versions of the mail to the lists. You can ignore
the first one. The mail sent at 13:26 is the correct one containing
more on topic text and with the off-topic stuff moved to the wiki.

I obviously happened to unknowlinlgy send the message before I had
moved the openEHR-organisation-related content to the wiki page and
continued to edit the mail. The wiki link is in the later version:
http://www.openehr.org/wiki/display/oecom/openEHR+transparency

// Erik