Archive for September, 2010

UKUUG & O’Reilly are pleased to announce details of the following forthcoming events:

Intermediate Perl – 15th & 16th February 2011

Advanced Perl  -  17th & 18th February 2011

http://www.ukuug.org/events/perl2011/

Venue: Imperial Hotel, Russell Square, London WC1B 5BB

2 day Intermediate Perl (including practical session)
NOTE:  All delegates will need to bring a laptop with a recent version of Perl installed.

Description: This course is aimed at people who have done a little Perl programming and who want to add another dimension to their Perl knowledge. This is the knowledge that separates real “Perl programmers” from people who simply “use Perl”.

Course Outline:
* Types of variable
* Strict and warnings
* References
* Sorting
* Reusable code
* Object orientation
* Testing
* Dates & times
* Templates
* Databases
* Further information

2 day Advanced Perl (including practical session)
NOTE:  All delegates will need to bring a laptop with a recent version of Perl installed.

Description: This course is aimed at people who have a lot of experience with Perl. It teaches many of the latest and most powerful techniques being used by Perl programmers. The exact contents of this course will change as new techniques are introduced.

Course Outline:
* Perl 5.10 & 5.12
* Advanced testing
*DBIx::Class
* Handling exceptions
* Profiling & benchmarking
* Catalyst
* Object Oriented programming with Moose
* Web development with Plack

Tutor: Dave Cross is the owner of Magnum Solutions Ltd, an Open Source consultancy company based in London. In 1998 he started london.pm which has grown to be one of the largest Perl Mongers groups in the world. He nominally led the group until September 2001. Between August 2002 and June 2006 he was the Perl Mongers User Groups Co-ordinator for the Perl Foundation. Dave is a regular speaker at Perl and Open Source conferences and is often invited to present tutorials alongside the main conference. He is the author of “Data Munging with Perl” (Manning, 2001) and a co-author of “Perl Template Toolkit” (O’Reilly, 2003). Dave lives in SW London. The rumours about gold-plated cats were never true.

Visit the UKUUG web site at:  http://www.ukuug.org/events/perl2011/ for delegate costs and on-line booking form.

***PLACES ARE LIMITED – EARLY BOOKING IS ESSENTIAL***

Early-bird rates available until Friday 28th January

Benefits of Free/Libre Open Source Software
in Health Care (FLOSS-HC)

Special track on FLOSS-HC projects and initiatives at Med-e-Tel 2011

Next years Med-e-Tel are organizing the 2nd FLOSS in health care track
Please feel free to have a look at last years program. Most of the presentations are also available online at MedFLOSS.org

Call for participation

After the success of its first edition at Med-e-Tel 2010 (23 speakers, 1 keynote presentation, 1 panel discussion), the Free/Libre Open Source Software in Health Care (FLOSS-HC) track 2011 aims to create the leading European summit bringing together FLOSS-HC developers, service providers and users from all over the world to cross-fertilize Open technological, business and social initiatives to shape the future of open health care systems.

Co-organized by the European Federation for Medical Informatics Free/Libre Open Source Working Group (EFMI LIFOSS WG), the International Medical Informatics Association Open Source Working Group (IMIA OS WG) and the International Society for Telemedicine & eHealth (ISfTeH), it offers a new platform for collaboration establishment, experience exchange and a unique opportunity to foster prospective thinking towards open, collaboratively developed systems in health care.

Submissions from all areas of health care are welcome that deal with free/libre open source software. Topics of interest for this track cover various aspects of FLOSS in health informatics, including but not limited to:

• collaborative care across the Internet
• interoperability between different FLOSS-HC systems
• free access to shared medical knowledge and Evidence Based Medicine (EBM)
• second opinion and support for training
• software solutions for low resource settings
• FLOSS-HC as a strategy for software development supported by welfare organizations
• systems for public health
• cross-fertilization with the Humanitarian FOSS (H-FOSS) community
• analysis of cultural differences which could require adapted software solutions
• reuse of modular software components
• FLOSS-HC in education

We also want to especially encourage open source software companies to provide some insights in their open source based business model, offered services and products. Potential subjects could be:

• successful business models for FLOSS in health care
• certification process: fulfillment of legal requirements as service
• successful co-existance of a community maintained main-project and a vendor extended sub-project
• license considerations: which license to choose to allow also commercial reuse in own products
• success stories: transformation from an originally closed to an open source development approach
• user acceptance: has “open source” already become a marketing argument?

Submission

Four types of submissions are welcome:
1. Paper
2. Poster
3. Software demos
4. Position paper

Authors that would like to submit a paper or poster should use the online abstract submission form and provide the keyword “FLOSS-HC” in their list of keywords.

For software demo and position paper submissions, authors should send their abstract (max. 1 page) to the FLOSS-HC track chair, Thomas Karopka, at tkaropka@googlemail.com.

Deadline for papers and posters: 10 December 2010
Deadline for demos and position papers: 14 January 2011

Registration

Click here to register for the Med-e-Tel conference (incl. access to the FLOSS-HC track).

Venue

Luxexpo
10 circuit de la Foire Internationale
1347 Luxembourg
Luxembourg
Click here for a local area map.

Hotels

For hotel information and reservation form, click here.

Questions, suggestions and expressions of interest to participate are welcome at:

tkaropka@googlemail.com
info@medetel.eu

Paul Richardson will give a talk for the Open Source Specialist Group (OSSG) around his recently created  http://www.oshi-uk.com/ which is an expression/discussion focal point on the adoption of Open Source by the NHS.

This  event is free and open to all and will be held at the BCS Central London Offices, First Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London WC2E 7HA (http://www.bcs.org/upload/pdf/london-office-guide.pdf) on Thursday 30th September 2010. It will start immediately after the OSSG AGM at 1800 and is expected to finish around 2030.

Free buffet and refreshments available on the night.

To book a place to attend this event please contact Mark Elkins via mark_elkins@bcs.org

Paul’s objective of this meeting is to act as a rallying cry to those who are already convinced (or perhaps still slightly sceptical) of the place that Open Source software should have in UK healthcare, so that a coherent community can be established that can be empowered to spread the word, deal with the objections to open source (genuine or otherwise), and can support each other in projects and deployments.

First, as a scene-setting exercise, Paul will cover the following topics:

·         his assessment of the state of readiness of open source to be applied to the UK healthcare market

·         the willingness of key stakeholders to adopt open source

·         dealing with objections to open source

·         his proposed ‘top 10 projects’

·         progress on his own open source project, an ITK (Interoperability Tool Kit) compliant  middleware solution based on OpenESB

However, as this is intended to be a community building exercise, a significant proportion of the time will be spent facilitating and gaining consensus on issues such as:

·         agreeing priorities

·         how should we organise ourselves and communicate

·         activities

·         what representations we would like to make to the Department of Health

The Annual General Meeting (AGM) of the Open Source Specialist Group (OSSG) will be held on Thursday 30th September 2010 from 1800 hours at the BCS Central London Offices, First Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London WC2E 7HA.

The procedure governing the AGM is set out in the OSSG Constitution at http://ossg.bcs.org/wp-content/uploads/2006/06/OpenSourceConstitutionFinal.pdf

An event on Open Source Health Informatics is due to commence immediately after the business of the AGM has been concluded.

Free buffet and refreshments available.

For further information please contact Cornelia Boldyreff, OSSG Secretary via secretary@ossg.bcs.org

This presentation will discuss the development of a free-of-charge, open source, multi-user Enterprise Architecture (EA) toolkit. It will discuss its development, how it encapsulates the many years’ experience of EA consultants and reflects their exposure to a number of the major commercial EA toolkits, and its adoption across organizations of varying sizes across the world. The talk will also explain why it was decided to create an open source EA toolkit and how it compares with other similar toolkits.

This  event is free and open to all and will be held at the BCS Central London Offices, First Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London WC2E 7HA (http://www.bcs.org/upload/pdf/london-office-guide.pdf) on Tuesday 21sr September 2010. It will start immediately after the BCS Enterprise Architecture Specialist Group AGM at 1800.

To book a place at this event please visit: http://www.ea.bcs.org/eventbooking/showevent.php?eventid=esg1099

The presentation will be given by Alex Mayall who is the Managing Director and Senior Consulting Partner of Enterprise Architecture Solutions Ltd (EAS Ltd), a leading independent enterprise architecture consultancy. For over 20 years Alex has worked at a senior executive level with multinational companies spanning a wide range of commercial and industrial sectors. His consulting experience covered all aspects of business change from competitive strategy through to organizational behaviour and programme management, although his speciality lay in helping organizations improve their performance through the alignment of information technology with business strategy. Prior to 1990, Alex worked in the international chemicals industry in a variety of IT professional and management roles. He has been a Member of the British Computer Society since the mid-1960s.