LinuxChix Los Angeles

The excellent SCALE presentation on Open Molar – open source dental practice management was highlighted at LinuxMedNews this week.  The audio of the presentation is up at the SCALE site – slides are to follow.

I don’t know what else to add, other than this is an exemplar of what can accomplished with some determination and open source tools.  It isn’t acceptable to lock up healthcare systems in proprietary systems (a driver for this project) – there are alternatives, including rolling-your-own.

Amber Graner … NTEU (Not Technical End User). A year in the life of an Ubuntu end user activist. BIG MESSAGE … you can be involved without being an application developer, you are a contributor even without coding.

Open source can change world, sometimes one person at time, one application at a time. Even small contributions to open source in whatever capacity makes a difference.

Open source is not a ladder with directional rungs, but a lattice. Any entry point leads to somewhere.

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Malakai Wade, Mirano Cafiero, & Saskie Wade
Ultimate Randomness–Girl Voices in Open Source

This was the first talk at WIOS and I am sure is going to be one of the best of SCALE 8X
All three speakers were enthusiastic young girls who talked about their experience in Open Source and Linux. The girls talked about creating artwork in the GIMP and Tux Paint and their use of the OLPC Sugar OS Laptops. They also presented us with their artwork created in the GIMP and Tux Paint and with a beautifully made slideshow with sound created in Linux. The slideshow was a whimsical stop motion piece of Barbies waking up in the Barbie Doll House. It was created in the style of an old silent film, complete with music and verbal cue slides. All the girls are geeks, enthursiastic. learning Linux and spreading the word of Open Source! Yeaaahhhhaaahhhh!!!!!

/JilliX

Senator Grassley of the Senate Finance Committee overseeing Medicare and Medicaid reads the Riot Act to software vendor over closed source tactics for Electronic Health Records.

These include a “hold harmless” clause – shifting any responsibility for system errors onto the physician and “gag rules” to prevent public disclosure of system defects.

Can it get any more un-open-source than that? Looks like another argument in favor of Open Source software for healthcare.

I see Mr. Obama’s group seems to believe in the use of Drupal.

Don’t ya just love leadership by example?

They are having way to much fun in Sweden!

I guess now we know what’s keeping Pirate Bay going!