Life at Eclipse

I thought Gunnar Hellekson’s post on the recent RFP from the US Veteran’s Administration (VA) to open source their VistA electronic healthcare record (EHR) system was a great overview of the challenges facing massive government agencies as they attempt to adopt an open source approach to their mission. I definitely agree with the list of challenges and issues that Gunnar has laid out for the proposal. I further agree with Ben Mehling of Medsphere that the exciting thing is that “…it’s no longer a question of IF, but rather WHEN…” the VA is going to open source VistA.

As a tax payer, citizen and frequent user of healthcare services, I am terribly excited about the idea of a truly open source community creating a free platform for EHR for use around the world. Certainly we could use something like this here in Canada. The ability of open source to provide a worldwide, vendor-neutral software platform that an ecosystem can thrive, compete and innovate upon is unparalleled. Given the dire straits that virtually all modern healthcare systems find themselves in, the potential upside implicit in what the VA is proposing is an incredible opportunity. You can see a good review of the potential in this paper from Carnegie Mellon funded by the VA as it did its due diligence.

The RFP’s main objective is the creation of a “Custodial Agent” to act as the governing body for a VistA community. The interesting challenge ahead for the VA as they create such a body will be to balance their impulse to control, relative to the need for community. The notion of “Control versus Community” is well documented in Matt Aslett’s work from the 451 Group, a nice summary of which has been provided by Henrik Ingo. And frankly, I am very worried that there are a long list of impediments which could cause this initiative to fail.

We all know that governments are by their very nature conservative, and primarily serviced by firms which specialize in knowing how to meet the specific requirements of their complex procurement and management processes. And despite the best of intentions, I struggle to believe that the people and institutions behind this initiative will be successful in establishing a truly vendor-neutral, open, transparent and meritocratic community which can deliver on the vision. Not because of lack of desire, but because of lack of knowledge and the specific skillsets of experienced community development people. You know: the folks who’ve been there, done that and “get it”. I worry that what will come out of this process will be what Matt Aslett called “Stage 3 – Vendor-dominated open source development and distribution project”, except that the “Vendor” here will be the VA and a prime contractor. If that happens, I highly doubt that this initiative will be the success it deserves to be. Or perhaps I’m overly pessimistic, and this is simply a learning stage that the VA and its ecosystem will need to go through. After all, lots of very smart companies made the same errors early in their march towards openness.

To me, the logical solution to VA’s search for a governing body would be to take VistA to a community which already exists, and which already has a clear community-based governance model in place. Reading the RFP, I could not help but think that at least three quarters of the required responses could simply be links to already existing governance, process and licensing documents already here at the Eclipse Foundation. And most of the remaining pieces could be implemented as an industry working group. Too bad VistA is implemented using MUMPS, which is not exactly a mainstream Eclipse development platform.

Certainly our good friends and former colleagues over at OpenHealthTools.org would be a logical fit as well. They have been working in the healthcare domain with a view towards creating an Eclipse-style community for years. And no one knows ecosystem development better than their Executive Director, Skip McGaughey. Surely one of the vendors interested in responding to this will do the sensible thing and enlist their support in their submission?

So this will be a very interesting space to watch. It is incredibly daring for an organization the size of the VA to embrace open source as a strategy. This is a long overdue initiative, as the current mess of software systems and vendors has created the very definition of a gridlock economy in the application of IT to healthcare. I’m impressed with the process that led to the RFP. My fingers are crossed that the stars align to deliver a truly open platform for innovation in healthcare.

Each year, the Eclipse Foundation recognizes key contributors and committers amongst its community with awards. This year we created a new Lifetime Contribution Award to recognize an individual who has a long, sustained record of contribution to Eclipse as a whole. That is, all three communities of Eclipse: adopters, users, and committers. The award is chosen by the Eclipse Foundation Staff, and in our view is a recognition of the community member we feel has long made valuable contributions to the success of Eclipse. And we don’t mean technical contributions to projects, no matter how brilliant. We mean contributions which have impacted the success of the community.

The winner of the first ever Eclipse Foundation Lifetime Contribution Award is David Williams of IBM.

David Williams Accepting His Eclipse Lifetime Contribution Award

David has been a member of Eclipse since 2004, is a committer on 10 Eclipse Projects, Project Lead of 3, an active member of the Tools PMC, PMC Leader of the Web Tools Platform Project, and current chair of the Eclipse Planning Council. Above and beyond all that, though, David has helped all of Eclipse by leading many of the yearly Simultaneous Release trains: starting with the very first one, Callisto, setting in motion the vision and basic mechanisms that are still in place. While not the official lead of Europa or Ganymede David was still central to getting them done, on time. Finally, becoming Planning Council Chair during Galileo, he lead it to completion, then Helios, and now Indigo. David has successfully balanced being both mentor and task-master to keep everyone on track, meeting the requirements to form a common software site repository at Eclipse, which in turn is an enormous benefit to all three communities of Eclipse: adopters, users, and committers.

David is without a doubt one of the most highly regarded members of the Eclipse community. He is a tireless worker with a key focus on doing the right thing for the projects. His dedication is remarkable and I was pleased to see his recognition with the Lifetime Contribution Award this year.

I would like to thank IBM for supporting David’s continuing contributions to the future success of Eclipse.

Please join me in congratulating David!

I am pleased to announce the results of the 2011 Eclipse Foundation Board elections.

The elected Committer Member representatives for 2011 will be:

• Chris Aniszczyk
• Boris Bokowski
• Ed Merks

The elected Sustaining Member (e.g. Solution and Enterprise Member) representatives for 2011 will be:

• Eric Clayberg (Google)
• Hans Kamutzki (MicroDoc)
• Mik Kersten (Tasktop)

Please join me in extending a hearty congratulations to the winners!

I would also like to extend a warm “thank you” to the other candidates: Tim Barnes, Weber Canova, John Cunningham and Gunnar Wagenknecht.

In addition, I would like to recognize Adam Lieber (Intalio) for the past service he provided to the Eclipse Foundation as a Director. He has has been excellent representative for our community and will be missed.

Voting begins today for the 2011 Eclipse Foundation Board of Director elections. We have a great slate of candidates, each of whom brings a great deal of knowledge and experience with the Eclipse community to the table. I highly encourage everyone to get involved with this process and vote! I cannot overstate how important these elected directors are to the functioning of the Board, the Foundation and the community.

If you are eligible to vote, you should soon be receiving an email with your voting credentials. If you believe you are eligible, but do not receive credentials, please contact webmaster@eclipse.org.

Just in case you hadn’t noticed, the nominations are in, and the “campaign” phase of our 2011 Board of Director elections in now in full swing.

I have to say that I am particularly impressed with the quality of the candidates this year. There are a lot of well-known and well-respected community leaders who have thrown their hats into the ring. Every one of them should be commended for volunteering their time and energy to improving the Eclipse community and its governance.

The Eclipse Foundation has a unique governance model in the open source world, and one which I believe works extremely well. As I recently commented on the OpenJDK governance conversation:

The Eclipse Board explicitly has a mix of business-centric and community-centric representatives on it. In practice, it has actually worked well because the diversity of views have generally speaking resulted in better decisions. Diversity takes many forms, but it is almost always a force for good.

The people running in this election are your community-centric representatives. They have an enormously positive influence on the Board’s decisions, and the elected directors past and present have been a big part of our collective success.

I strongly encourage everyone within the Eclipse community to check out the candidates pages, ask questions on the foundation forum and vote in the coming weeks!