BarCampPhilly - an amazing vibe

I spent today at BarCamp Philly. You can check out the day through a number of routes. Try barcamphilly.org as the main site. Also do a search on twitter for the #bcphilly tag. The schedules are there on the barcamphilly.org site. The iphone app to track the schedule worked really well. Great work team! Is that software available for use at other events?

Roz (aka Stellargirl) and JPToto and others did a great job to organize a fantastic day at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.

I ended up presenting a session on Data Portability in Health Care. The focus was on how to get consumer engagement. Let's drive a push for adoption of OpenID, OAuth and microformats from the consumer perspective. He have to take our health in to our own hands. There seems to be an increasing recognition that we need to address single sign-on and data portability in healthcare.

I talked with a number of great people like Mary Ann Geier and Phil Baumann. All are interested in Health Care issues. I know I have missed other names. If I did, please leave a comment below and register your interest on the subject of Health. The bottom line is that there is a real interest in launching a HealthCampPhilly. The HealthCamp movement is growing like crazy. We have HealthCampUK happening this coming Monday (November 10th). We have HealthCampMd, to be held at Stevenson University (formerly Villa Julie College) in January. HealthCampDc set for February at CareFirst in Washington DC. HealthCampWv courtesy of Bob Coffield happening in March 2009 in Charleston, WV. Last week HealthCampNash also got proposed for Spring 2009 in Nashville, TN. I am also looking at hosting a HealthCampBoston on April 24th, 2009 - alongside the Health 2.0 conference.

The momentum that is growing around HealthCamp just reflects the consumer dissatisfaction with the current state of HealthCare and the recognition that we, the consumer, can make a difference if we demand change.

At BarCampPhilly I also gave a couple of sessions on the use of JackBe's Presto platform. This is a mature Enterprise Mashup Platform that recently revamped it's development licensing. They now offer free perpetual development licenses. This is a great move to stimulate the developer community. The feedback I got on the platform was overwhelmingly positive. I would really like to see the JackBe platform at the Boston Health 2.0 conference providing demonstrations of how their platform can integrate information across disparate Health care sites. I definitely need to work on this as an idea.