I was reading the Healthcare IT guy’s blog and saw a post about a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) Healthcare IT conference going on in Houston July 31, 2009 – August 2, 2009. According to Shahid, one of the most outspoken proponents of FOSS in Healthcare, Fred Trotter, is one of the people behind the unconference.
I’m not sure why they chose Houston for this conference. I think Las Vegas would have been a much better choice, but yes I am completely biased because I live in Las Vegas. All of that said, I love what Fred Trotter is trying to do and so I’m excited to promote those who are pushing for free emr and open source emr (see also our Open Source and Free EMR list on our wiki).
You can go and register for the event at the incredibly reasonable rate of $60 if you do it before March 1.
My hope is that Fred also embraces some great streaming video technology such as UStream and makes the conference proceedings available to those of us that can’t make it to Houston. I know I’d tune in and I’d even be willing to embed the UStream video on this blog for others to attend as well. Only challenge might be the fact that it’s an unconference. Not sure the format they’ll be using and if that will translate well to video.
I like the idea of video, and I have been planning on doing something with that. But I want to find a way to stream using FOSS.
Do you know of any Open Source streaming engines that you can recommend?
-FT
Hi Fred,
Glad you’re visiting my blog. I don’t know of any FOSS solutions that can stream video to a number of locations. I know VideoLan can be used as a server for streaming video, but I’m not sure how easy it would be to connect multiple users to it.
I can appreciate the effort in trying to get a FOSS stream, but considering that uStream, Justin.tv or other sites like it will stream it for free, that seems like it fits into the spirit of FOSS.
I know in many conferences I’ve been to, the chat that goes alongside the video on those 2 sites has been as valuable and interesting as the conference itself.
I’ve heard about Courts using video conferencing technologies especially in the rural areas and villages. Even though it’s an expensive approach but it’s a great way for developing these areas.
I did a quick search of the internet and found a good FOSS solution for streaming video. Also it is designed for streaming in OGG format (also an open source format)
http://www.jcraft.com/jroar/
I found several solutions searching for “gpl streaming server” but this one specifically mentioned OGG.
Take care
Thanks for the info. Have you ever used jroar? Does it work well?
No I have never used it, But I have used Ogg vobis codex. for Audio compression and video compression. I do like the format Ogg.