Seems DEOSS and its open source values are gaining followers from all over the country. This is an account of a meeting that took place 2006-10-26 between a delegation from Derbyshire NHS Primary Care Trust and DEOSS developer Garfield Lucas.

Present...

• Linda Jones (Derbyshire County PCT)
• Wayne Chapman (Derbyshire County PCT)
• Garfield Lucas (Wessex/DEOSS)

Apologies...

• Kate Marsden (Derbyshire County PCT)
• Nick priest (Wessex/Dental Vocational Training)

Items discussed...

Garfield Lucas gave a presentation that outlined the concepts behind open source software and discussed its massive cost savings potential. Garf also indicated that for some purposes open source was also technically superior and how it offered the possibility of much faster application development.

The presentation itself was created in open source software - OpenOffice and is available on line as an SWF (Shockwave Flash) file here .

The meeting lasted nearly five hours and a great deal was discussed, including some very innovative ideas being developed at Derbyshire County PCT, overseen by Linda and coded by Wayne. And the subject of helping Wayne acquire PHP programming skills was also discussed.

Main areas of agreement...

1. Garf agreed to set up a copy of "phpMyCourseman " web-based courses database for Wayne to test. This is a relational database that runs on PHP & MySQL on our DEOSS web server. The general consensus at the meeting was that it will do many of the things Derbyshire County PCT needs with regard to course management. Wessex Deanery Dental has been using the same software for the last six months. It will integrate with an existing web site(s) if required and Derbyshire PCT can even 'wrap' its own site around it. This should be ready by 2006-11-02.

2. Garf also agreed to set up a Moodle course for Derbyshire PCT to experiment with. http://moodle.deoss.org . As soon as Wayne creates an account, and emails Garf, then Garf will set up a 'pilot' course.  This means Derbyshire PCT can have a go at setting up and administering a Moodle course for itself.

3. Garf also set up accounts at "DEOSS positive" for Wayne & Linda so they can contribute articles and post on the discussion forums here at DEOSS. http://www.deoss.org.uk/positive or http://forum.deoss.org Other members of Derbyshire PCT were also invited register a DEOSS positive account too

Costs

At the moment there are no hosting costs for Derbyshire PCT. And it gets Moodle and the phpMyCourseman database Garf wrote for free too.

However, Garf has personally bankrolled the new DEOSS server. Therefore it was agreed to review the situation in 2007 March - when Garf expects to ask all users to contribute cost towards the running expenses of the server.  

Currently Garf is unsure exactly what the costs will be but they will be fair and reasonable and definitely won't break the bank. Following subsequent discussions with colleagues Garf estimates cost to be somewhere around £600 per database per year. This is based on what it cost to set up and maintain the DEOSS server, together with various estimates of DEOSS usage for March 2007. Obviously this includes regular maintenance and security updates etc.

Use of "DEOSS Positive" will remain free regardless.

Hopefully Derbyshire PCT will stay with DEOSS and we will develop projects and ideas together in a helpful, constructive and cooperative manner. However if Derbyshire PCT (or other any DEOSS users) decide they want to move their data to another server or service provider, then DEOSS will provide the user with its current dataset(s), in industry standard mySQL format, in a timely manner. Absolutely no Lock-ins!

If you have an elearning project that needs affordable software design, setting up, hosting or management - and you don't want to pay silly prices or lose control over your project - then please click here to talk to Garf and the DEOSS team. They are always delighted to show you how to do it.