Ignite Gov Ending, Thanks To Everyone

Last year, on the last day of the HIMSS'11 conference, Richard Boyd of Lockheed Martin Virtual World Labs shared his "Simulation Prescription"; showing how gaming and simulation technology have the potential to further revolutionize health care. One year later, OATV was able to catch up with Richard, now Director of Emerging and Disruptive Technologies (or as Aneesh Chopra calls him - "Disruptive Man"), on the developments that Lockheed Martin has taken to create a Virtual World Ecosystem Framework. The great news? Lockheed has taken a kernel approach, creating roles for what he hopes is going to become a massively parallel contribution system. AND it's going to be released with an open license with the goal of getting simulation everywhere on any modern web browser. Richard says that we can expect to see the software "kernel" made available midway through 2012, thanks in large part to some of Lockheed's federal partners.

At HIMSS12 in Las Vegas, Open Affairs TV spoke with Phil Fasano, Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer of Kaiser Permanente, the nation’s largest not-for-profit health plan and health care provider about some of the technology being contributed to the open-source community by KP. Convergent medical terminology released in 2010, is a dictionary of medical terms that translates between doc-speak and layperson terms for use online. The company hopes that use of this language database will enable and encourage future interoperability between medical systems, and is contributing $1 million annually to help integrate the library both nationally and internationally.

Recorded at the first-ever O'Reilly Health Foocamp. @ePatientDave deBronkart, Health IT expert Keith "@motorcycle_guy" Boone and ONC "Consumerista" @Lygeia Riccardi go all-out on their wonderful rap sone "I wanna be an e-Patient". If you're a healthcare geek, it's a must watch!

Tony McCormick, Secretary of the Open EMR Foundation, and Project manager of their Meaningful Use certification talks about the history of the project.

Proclaiming "today is the best time to be a healthcare entrepreneur in America", Unites States Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra stood before a room of health IT and business leaders at the HIMSS 2011 Health IT Venture Fair & Strategic Partner Forum. Kicking off the pre-conference panel of government leaders in health IT, management and policy. Joining Chopra were Peter Levin, CIO of the Veterans Administration, and Farzad Mostashari, MD Deputy National Coordinator of the Office of National Coordinator, the office overseeing technical and policy aspects of US healthcare transformation efforts. The one-day venture forum preceded the HIMSS 2011 Annual Conference & Exposition, and focused on driving healthcare IT related innovation and economic development opportunities in the private sector based on opportunities presented in the HITECH and Affordable Care Acts.

Steve Holden welcomes guests during his Open Bastion launch in Portland Oregon on February 17th, 2011. Steve announced his move to Portland, the launch of The Open bastion, as well as a call to action for a broad cross-section of the Portland open source, government and technology communities.

On the last day of 2011 Healthcare Information Systems Society's Annual Conference & Exhibition, Richard Boyd, Chief Architect for Lockheed Martin Virtual World Labs, a renown expert in virtual reality simulation for computer gaming, defense and film industries, shared some of his vision about how advances in gaming and simulation technology have the potential to further revolutionize the healthcare industry, just as other advances in healthcare information technology shown by exhibitors and sessions at HIMSS 11 have done. In particular, Boyd demonstrated examples using interactive 3D simulation technology to enhance understanding of complex healthcare system environments and better forecast potential disruptive events. As one of the creators of the Lockheed Martin Virtual World Labs, Boyd leads a group that utilizes cutting edge gaming and virtual world technologies to improve human performance. Before joining Lockheed, Boyd was the General Manager and VP of Sales for Virtus Corporation, where authors Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton were but a few of the collaborators Boys worked with as their gaming titles pushed the envelope of technology. While this session demonstrated very little in the way of open source technology, it does underscore examples of how technology has the potential to be re-purposed in ways that are not initially intended.

GOSCON 2010 opened with a general session; "Executive Open Data Roundtable: The State of Open Government". The Roundtable featured state, city and federal leaders exploring the successes and challenges of the open government directive. The roundtable included discussion of the successes and challenges launching their “Open” initiatives, programs influence on state and local government operations, and the role of open source software in executing the programs. The roundtable was led by Andy Stein, Director of Information Technology for the City of Newport News, Virginia and perennial GOSCON Committee member. Early in the panel, Stein set an "open" stage, inviting attendees to be ready with questions after short introduction by the panelists. In 2008, Stein was appointed as a volunteer Senior Advisor on Open Collaboration to former Secretary of Technology for the Commonwealth of Virginia, Aneesh Chopra, now CTO of the United States Federal Government. In 2009, Andy was named on the Government Technology list of 2009 Doers, Dreamers and Drivers. Roundtable participants included: Marion Royal, Program Director for data.gov, Agency Expert, Office of Citizens Services and Innovative Technology, General Services Administration Andrew Hoppin, Chief Information Officer, New York State Senate Carolyn Lawson Dep. Director, Technology Services Governance Division, State of California Dugan Petty, Chief Information Officer, State of Oregon Mark Greinke, Chief Technology Officer, City of Portland, Oregon

Sean McSpaden, Oregon State Deputy CIO, spoke with Deb Bryant, GOSCON conference Chair and Public Sector Communities Manager from Oregon State University’s Open Source Lab. McSpaden was attending the 2010 Government Open Source Conference. Bryant initially asked about the state of the Virtual USA Program and the Oregon’s participation in the program. McSpaden detailed its evolution, from a collaboration between the State of Alabama’s Virtual Alabama Project and Virginia’s VIPER project to the eventual creation of a consortium of States, first in the Southeast and then in the Pacific Northwest. The consortium has been coordinated byDepartment of Homeland Security, Science & Technology Directorate Command, Control & Interoperability Division. The overall project is intended to create a common operating picture for emergency response by enabling the sharing of information across multiple agencies and even multiple states. McSpaden went on to say that the system proved useful during the Gulf oil spill thanks to its basis on open standards, allowing BP, Walmart, as well as other responders to effectively operate their respective portions of the response effort. While the platform and system underlying the several state capabilities developed via Virtual USA program are proprietary, McSpaden did say that there was an attempt to adopt some of the hallmarks of an open source project. A focus on interoperability, permitting code sharing and utilization of open data standards are just a few points that McSpaden mentions. McSpaden says for example, the work on Virginia’s VIPER system was done for hire by a contractor with expertise in Adobe Flex and ESRI software. However, one of the main requirements was that Virtual USA must support users in a multi-viewer environment, allowing for consumption of data in users own systems. McSpaden also shared details of Oregon’s open data initiative on Data.Oregon.gov site. McSpaden explained that they planned to leverage partnerships with agencies like Oregon’s Department of Environmental Quality as well as the Oregon Department of Transportation, and said that their approach was to permit a “wide and varied focus of interest” on the types of data state Oregon agencies bring to the table. “We want to mash it with our Geospatial holdings”, McSpaden said. Contrary to the opinions of some civic application developers and enthusiasts who are using these raw data sets to build “civic applications”, McSpaden asserted that Oregon is working to provide the information as continuously available open data services to its consumers, not as data sets to be repetitively downloaded by interested parties. UPDATE: We thank Mr. McSpaden for contacting us with clarifications to the facts presented, and those corrections have been incorporated.

John Scott, Director of Open Source Software and Open Integration at RadientBlue Technologies, joined Deb Bryant of Oregon State University's Open Source Lab to discuss how open source software and development approaches are used in the US Department of Defense. John is well known for his work for the DoD on the groundbreaking "Open Technology Development Roadmap". Published in April of 2006, the document examines opportunities that DoD could exploit to improve technology outcomes and lower costs, largely addressing the change in culture and practices that DoD would need to undertake to take advantage of OSS in the US Military. Scott also participates deeply in the Military Open source community, managing the Mil-OSS Google Group and organizing events including the Mil-OSS conference & unconference. Information can be found at http://mil-oss.org/. In the interview, Scott talks about recent news about OSS throughout the DOD. He shares news of a recent policy memo issued but the DoD CIO, recognizing open source software and participation in open source communities and projects as being officially permitted by the US Department of Defense. He also shares news of a forthcoming DoD open technology "field manual", addressing needs throughout the DoD to understand how to utilize open source on a military project. Scott also mentions some military software projects that have been released to the world as open source projects. He talks about the growth of geospatial OSS and he specifically mentions Falconview, a route planning & spatial analysis system used by the Marines for route planning. Scott also credits the rest of the US Federal Government for adopting more open source software, especially state and local government where lots of discussion are happening. Thanks to John for joining us. His blog can be found at http://powdermonkey.blogs.com/.