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The next Open Steps – after Marwell

Two further meetings are currently planned, with the aim of exploring some of the issues raised from the Marwell meeting with different audiences. A selection of the same background questions will be asked at each meeting, and the key issues that have been raised will be explored, as the scope of the meetings allows.

The first post-Marwell meeting will be held at HC2004 (the Annual Conference and Exhibition organised by the British Computer Society Health Informatics Committee and BJHC Limited) in Harrogate in March, 2004. This meeting will be open to all conference delegates, so potentially provides a much larger audience of clinicians, managers, informaticians and other interested parties, with a greater diversity of views on FLOSS to attend, and to explore the issues raised from the Marwell meeting. This will be only a short meeting (80 minutes), and so will not allow for the wide discussion that was possible at Marwell. The aim is to put the issues to a primarily UK audience that is composed of people working in and for the NHS, to see how their views compare with those of the Marwell participants.

A further meeting, to seek international exploration of the issues raised in the first two meetings, will be held at medinfo2004 in San Francisco in September, as part of the IMIA Open Source and Open Source Nursing Informatics Working Groups’ meeting.

In addition, an iterative series of reports from all of these meetings, each building on the previous ones, will be made available through the chirad.info website, and we will encourage further contributions from those unable to attend the Open Steps meetings.

The main issues from the meetings will be widely circulated within the FLOSS and health informatics communities in the UK and globally, and a series of publications and conference presentations prepared based in the meeting findings. Other FLOSS groups will, in particular, be invited to comment on the results of the meetings, and we will be seeking to encourage discussion and exploration of ways in which the various groups can work together where they identify common interest and importance.

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Copyright (c) 2004 IMIA Open Source Working Group and British Computer Society Health Informatics Committee

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