European Union starts project about economic effects of open government data

Earlier this week I talked to writer and open source advocate Marco Fioretti, who has just announced the start of a study on open data for the European Union. Fioretti is a long-time supporter of open source software, which he wrote about in a chapter of the O'Reilly book Open Government. Fioretti also held a seminar about open and prorietary formats at Pisa's Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies, a major European college in the field of economics.

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What I like about the health care technology track at the Open Source convention

The list of sessions at the Open Source convention's health care track was published this week. We found it wonderfully gratifying to get so many excellent submissions in the brief three weeks that the Request for Proposals was up. Although the credentials of the presenters cover a lot of impressive accomplishments, my own evaluation focused on how the topics fit into four overarching areas we're following at O'Reilly:

• Patient-centered records, education, and activity
• Mobile devices to collect and distribute health care information
• Administrative efficiencies, which could range from automating a manual step in a process to revising an entire workflow to eliminate wasteful activities
• The collection, processing, and display of statistics to improve health care

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Crowdsourcing and the challenge of payment

An unusual Distributed Distributed Work Meetup was held last night in four different cities simultaneously, arranged through many hours of hard work by Lukas Biewald and his colleagues at distributed work provider CrowdFlower.

With all the sharing of experiences and the on-the-spot analyses taking place, I didn't find an occasion to ask my most pressing question, so I'll put it here and ask my readers for comments:

How can you set up crowdsourcing where most people work for free but some are paid, and present it to participants in a way that makes it seem fair?

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Notes from the Politics of Open Source conference

Small conferences are often the best, especially when there's a high concentration of really well-educated and personally committed people sharing a room for two days. That's what I found at the Politics of Open Source conference at the University of Massachusetts Amherst on Friday. (I could attend only the second day.)

The conference was the brainchild of the Journal of Information Technology & Politics, which will publish articles based on conference talks in an upcoming issue. The editors have agreed to release the papers under an open license, and drafts are up on the web now -- for instance, the draft of my paper Promoting Open Source Software in Government: The Challenges of Motivation and Follow-Through.

Along with celebrity keynoters -- Eric Von Hippel and Clay Johnson -- the presenters as well as the attendees could boast a lot of real-world experience, a lot of serious academic achievement, and occasionally even a combination of the two.

They covered a lot in two days, too. A conference organizer summarized the main themes as:

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Report from Health Information Technology in Massachusetts

When politicians organize a conference, there's obviously an agenda--beyond the published program--but I suspect that it differed from the impressions left by speakers and break-out session attendees at Health Information Technology: Creating Jobs, Reducing Costs, & Improving Quality.

A quick overview of what I took away from the conference is sobering. Health care costs will remain high for many years while we institutionalize measures intended to reduce them. Patients will still have trouble getting their records in electronic form to a different doctor (much less access it themselves). And quality control will make slow headway against the reluctance of doctors to share data on treatment outcomes.

Still, I have to give the optimists their due, and chief among the optimists is Richard Shoup, director of the Massachusetts eHealth Institute and one of the conference's key organizers. He points out that the quality control measures emerging at the federal level (the "meaningful use" criteria for electronic health records) meshes excellently with both the principles and the timing legislated in Section 305 in the Massachusetts health care bill. Massachusetts has a long history of health care IT deployment and of collaboration to improve quality. "All stakeholders are at the table," he says, and the Massachusetts eHealth Institute recently floated a statewide plan for implementing health care IT.

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DC Circuit court rules in Comcast case, leaves the FCC a job to do

Today's ruling in Comcast v. FCC will certainly change the terms of debate over network neutrality, but the win for Comcast is not as far-reaching as headlines make it appear. The DC Circuit court didn't say, "You folks at the Federal Communications Commission have no right to tell any Internet provider what to do without Congressional approval." It said, rather, "You folks at the FCC didn't make good arguments to prove that your rights extend to stopping Comcast's particular behavior."

I am not a lawyer, but to say what happens next will take less of a lawyer than a fortune-teller. I wouldn't presume to say whether the FCC can fight Comcast again over the BitTorrent issue. But the court left it open for the FCC to try other actions to enforce rules on Internet operators. Ultimately, I think the FCC should take a hint from the court and stop trying to regulate the actions of telephone and cable companies at the IP layer. The hint is to regulate them at the level where the FCC has more authority--on the physical level, where telephone companies are regulated as common carriers and cable companies have requirements to the public as well.

The court noted (on pages 30 through 34 of its order) that the FCC missed out on the chance to make certain arguments that the court might have looked on more favorably. Personally and amateurly, I think those arguments would be weak anyway. For instance, the FCC has the right to regulate activities that affect rates. VoIP can affect phone rates and video downloads over the Internet can affect cable charges for movies. So the FCC could try to find an excuse to regulate the Internet. But I wouldn't be the one to make that excuse.

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Imagine a world that has moved entirely to cloud computing

For April Fools Day I'm offering a short story about a future world that has moved entirely to cloud computing: Hardware Guy. The cloud still scares as many IT managers as it attracts. But the advantages of cloud computing for maintenance, power consumption, and other things suggests it will dominate computing in a decade or so. Meanwhile, other changes are affecting the way we use data everyday. Movements such as NoSQL, big data, and the Semantic Web all come at data from different angles, but indicate a shift from retrieving individual facts we want to looking at relationships among huge conglomerations of data. I've explored all these things in blogs on this site, along with some other trends such as shrinking computer devices, so now I decided to combine them in a bit of a whacky tale.

Why health care is coming to the Open Source convention

This year for the first time, O'Reilly's Open Source convention contains a track on health care IT. The call for participation just went up, soliciting proposals on nine broad areas of technology including health data exchange, mobile devices, and patient-centered care.

One correspondent asked a bit timidly whether it would be all right to submit a proposal if her company didn't use open source software. Definitely! The Open Source convention has always been about a wide range of computing practices that promote openness in various ways. Open source software is a key part of the picture but not the whole picture. Open data, standards, and collaborative knowledge sharing are also key parts of the revolution in today's health care.

This new track is as much a response to urgings from friends and colleagues as it is an O'Reilly initiative. We could use help spreading the word, because the deadline for proposals is tight. In this blog I'll explain why we created the track and why OSCon is a promising venue for trends that will move and shake health care in positive ways.

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Current activities at the Electronic Privacy Information Center

When Marc Rotenberg founded the Electronic Privacy Information Center in 1994, I doubt he realized how fast their scope would swell as more and more of our lives became digitized and networked. Now it seems like everything that happens in society has an electronic component and a privacy component. I had the chance to drop in to their office on Monday and heard about the front-burner items they're working on.

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Report from HIMSS Health IT conference: building or bypassing infrastructure

Today the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference wrapped up. In previous blogs, I laid out the benefits of risk-taking in health care IT followed by my main theme, interoperability and openness. This blog will cover a few topics about a third important issue, infrastructure.

Why did I decide this topic was worth a blog? When physicians install electronic systems, they find that they need all kinds of underlying support. Backups and high availability, which might have been optional or haphazard before, now have to be professional. Your patient doesn't want to hear, "You need an antibiotic right away, but we'll order it tomorrow when our IT guy comes in to reboot the system." Your accounts manager would be almost as upset if you told her that billing will be delayed for the same reason.

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Recent Posts

• Report from HIMSS Health IT conference: toward interoperability and openness on March 3, 2010
• Report from HIMSS Health IT conference: from Silicon Valley technology to Silicon Valley risk-taking on March 2, 2010
• NoSQL conference coming to Boston on February 24, 2010
• Innovation Lessons in "Start-Up Nation" on February 14, 2010
• One hundred eighty degrees of freedom: signs of how open platforms are spreading on February 4, 2010
• Innovation Battles Investment as FCC Road Show Returns to Cambridge on January 14, 2010
• Pew Research asks questions about the Internet in 2020 on January 7, 2010
• The fate of WIPO, ACTA, and other intellectual property pushes in the international economy on January 6, 2010
• Being online: Conclusion--identity narratives on December 30, 2009
• Being online: Group identities and social network identities on December 28, 2009