The wiki category has been set up to try to address a problem of knowledge sharing and archival in clinical informatics, health technology, and digital health.
There is a lot of knowledge held in people’s brains but not much of it is written down. In the UK, much of the wisdom that helped the UK lead the world for a couple of decades in GP computing is being lost through retirement and, sadly, illness and death.
Knowledge and skills developed inside both public and private organisations is frequently not shared outside those organisations.
This wiki is an attempt to solve this.
Necessity
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We have all seen good work within both public and private organisations bring lost, deleted, or simply hidden behind a closed login wall. We believe this to be antithetical to the premise of open knowledge.
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The Balkanisation of clinical informatics since the demise of FCI has meant no single organisation seems to have the capability to make this work, therefore it must exist outside of all of those organisations but be able to have contributions from all.
Principles
- A single, inclusive, global home for clinical informatics knowledge sharing.
- No single organisation ‘owns’ the work, but all are welcome to contribute.
- The wiki must be publicly and openly accessible without login wall.
- All content must be addressable by URL, enabling rich linking.
- Workload is shared by assigning ‘curators’ for each article.
- Attribution of work serves as an incentive for individual or organisational participation.
- No knowledge is ever deleted, only marked as obsolete, preserving a useful historical archive.
- We do not want to duplicate anything that is already well covered elsewhere, for example on Wikipedia. Link to it instead.
Practical Implementation
In the spirit of “Talk is cheap. Show me the code”, we have moved into implementation already, to avoid Bikeshedding. Discussion on the details of this implementation is welcome, but discussion should not prevent progress being made.
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Domain name: for now we have opted to use openhealthhub.org which is already owned by @pacharanero and is set up with a Discourse forum
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Wiki: Discourse has acceptably-good Wiki features. All new Topics in wiki will be Wikified by default.
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Forum: We already had a forum at openhealthhub.org so why not let’s use that?
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Code Forge: We have an Organisation set up at GitHub for openhealthhub - we can use this to store and archive code and to build services (We will monitor GitHub’s suitability and be ready to move to a self-hosted equivalent if that becomes necessary).
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Emulation: The community has discussed in the past the idea of using virtualisation technologies to revive old and obsolete computing systems (The ‘Elephant’s Graveyard’ of obsolete GP IT systems) - initially we are focusing on cataloguing what we have, but in the future this is certainly possible.
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Video content archival: I have a YouTube channel called Everything Digital Health, which we can use to archive and publicise video content (We will monitor YouTube’s suitability and be ready to move to a self-hosted equivalent if that becomes necessary).
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Physical storage: for paper manuals, books, floppy disks, hardware - We don’t yet have a single suitable storage place for physical items relevant to health technology and clinical informatics, but if you have any, please catalogue them in this Wiki.