@Christian_Reich, just for the record: I never said we don’t need another working group. I merely listed all the things I think we need for a fully functional research network. (And I remembered another thing to add to the list: Governance, which deals with things like Data Use Agreements).
How we get this work done is another question. We could create a ‘Research Infrastructure Workgroup’, but I have some concerns about that:
- The scope of this workgroup would be hard to define. Is it ‘everything in OHDSI that doesn’t fall into any other workgroup’? Certainly this workgroup wouldn’t occupy itself with the CDM because we have a workgroup for that, or with the common technology stack because that is already specified by the architecture and methods workgroups. It shouldn’t have to solve the problem of a data quality framework, that is a whole workgroup in its own right.
- Having a workgroup is not the same as solving the problem
- I must admit to workgroup fatigue, but maybe I’m the only one
As a side note, I personally like things to grow organically. We were doing fine with e-mail, but now we need more so we should create a better file sharing solution. Currently, nobody has run into the obstacle of workflow management, so let’s not divert all our energy into solving that problem yet. Instead, I would argue our current biggest hurdle is getting everyone in OHDSI capable of leading and performing network studies, or phrased differently, ‘how to translate vague research interests into executable R packages’.