Health, VRM and Open Source - Coming together at BarCampRDU

This coming weekend is the third BarCampRDU, which is being held at the Red Hat Campus in Raleigh. I am traveling down to the event to join 250 others in discussions revolving around Open Source.

So far the proposed sessions include Data Portability, The Semantic Web, Distributed Agile, Rails/Groovy and other developer focused topics. The growing list is here. I have proposed sessions on Vendor Relationship Management and Social Networking and Open Standards in Health Care - aka Health 2.0 - a prelude to the discussions at HealthCampDc and HealthCampNy at the Web 2.0 Expo Web2Open unconference.

Hopefully Doc Searls won't mind me leveraging some of the great ground laying that he and various colleagues have done in order to spread the word on VRM. I will probably start with the VRM Principles:

Principles

1. User control
2. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle (Don't Reinvent the Wheel)
3. Reciprocity & Everybody Wins
4. Leverage network effects
5. Relationships are more than transactions
6. Solve real-world problems

I should probably also steal some slides from Doc's great intro talk on the VRM Manifesto.

Building on the VRM subject I am hoping to get in to discussions about using the Higgins Identity framework to manage federated group access policies. That could be a fascinating discussion that we just barely scraped the surface of, as we touched on R-Cards at the VRM Workshop.

I see a convergence of VRM with Health Care as the consumer becomes more involved in their own health. As that happens scalability becomes critical and the simplicity of Open Standards such as OpenID and OAuth will come in to play to enable seamless, heterogeneous integration. If I understand the principles behind R-Cards and I-Cards correctly these provide a stepping stone to the Personal Data Store that exists for VRM. The pointer-based nature of R-Cards would allow existing islands of information to be leveraged under the direction of the consumer - the real data owner.

The more I think about all these threads emerging, the more I get excited about our ability to make change happen. This week's BarCampRDU is set to be another stimulating un-conference event which should set the scene for HealthCampDc on September 12th and HealthCampNy immediately the following week.

Stay tuned - or better still - sign up and join in making change happen! You can even buy the T-Shirt!