This is the first of several belated posts summarising the EFMI STC 2008, held in London on 9-11 September, 2008 (see event website). The reasons for the lack of ‘live’ blogging have been covered in the preceding post; I can only use the excuse of being too busy to address the further delay. These posts cover my interpretations of some of what was said in some of the sessions; I have not covered everything, but if any participants wish to add anything in comments, please feel free to do so.

The day was opened and participants welcomed by David Clarke, Chief Executive of the British Computer Society (BCS), by Jacob Hofdijk, EFMI President, and by Graham Wright on behalf of the Local Organising and Scientific Programme Committees. Glyn Moody (opendotdotdot.blogspot.com) was the first speaker, explaining that his book “Digital Code of Life” was a “Rebel Code” approach for bioinformatics. He said that it is due to open source approaches that the human genome is in the public domain and not patented.

Turning to his main theme, on ‘why open source for health?’, he said that it gives more control and so is cheaper in the long term, as well as being more secure and more flexible. He said that Richard Stallman’s work on free software was inspired by the scientific method and culture of openness at MIT; the scientific approach to building on the work of others and contributing back to the commons. From this developed the  idea of free software. Open source depends on users from an early stage of development, contributing to bug fixes – medicine/health works in same way, Glyn asserted.

Open source (OS) advantages are that it is distributed, not centralised, and is driven by collaborating teams of specialists. OS is powered by peer esteem – this not an optional extra – reputation is a key factor in how system works; ‘you are what you do, not who you are’ – there are clear metrics for success and reputation. OS is about altruism, not money – is healthcare about this too?

OS has traditionally stronger on infrastructure, not specialised applications – for example, the GNU/Linux kernel. Institutional inertia, which varies by country, is one of the strongest barriers to using OS, and the UK is one of worst offenders. Nobody wants to stake their career on something new, and so there is a culture of extreme risk aversion, which leads to burying ever deeper into the mistakes of the past. OS thrives in an environment of well-defined open standards – lack of common, open standards is a barrier.

Glyn went on to describe several ‘opens’, with openness in healthcare being more than open source – openness in general is important in healthcare, for example open content (eg Medpedia – medpedia.com), open access, open genomics (referring to the Bermuda agreement on making all genomic data publicly available), and open data (access to data being important for science). Open access and open data lead to development of open science and open notebook science (daily publishing of what does and doesn’t work).

In summary, Glyn suggested that healthcare is made for OS – and vice versa – but OS is just the beginning of openness.

Technorati Tags: EFMI, open source, FLOSS

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