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Raleigh, NC
Rebecca Fernandez is a Principal Program Manager at Red Hat, leading projects to help the company scale its open culture. She's an Open Organization Ambassador, contributed to The Open Organization book, and maintains the Open Decision Framework. She is interested in the intersection of open source principles and practices, and how they can transform organizations for the better.
Authored Comments
For years in my late teens and early 20s, I had doctors and nurses looking at me strangely when they glanced through my medical chart at my general practitioner's office.
One day, a new doctor grabbed the chart of a patient with the same name. As we began to talk, I realized that she couldn't be looking at the right chart. Sure enough, the birthday was wrong. She went and grabbed my correct chart and began reading from it to confirm it was mine.
Then she read the words, "<name of a relative> is very concerned that the patient is engaging in promiscuous sexual relations."
Wow. Suddenly years of funny looks from various care providers made sense. (Not to mention a really, really strange conversation with one doctor years prior.)
I was able to explain to the doctor that I was an adult in a monogamous marriage, having dated the same person since the time that note was placed in my chart, and that my relative was a paranoid religious nutcase who had been accusing me of these sorts of things for most of my preteen and teen years. (But even I never imagined she'd call my doctor or that something like this could end up in my medical chart!)
So this bizarre experience illustrates why open access to medical records is DEFINITELY a good idea. (And why teens should have more legally mandated privacy.)
Does any of the kids' work count as "fair use," do they get to claim fair use for classroom purposes, do they have to ask permission for practice, etc.? I'd love to hear what you ultimately decided.
And do your kids know their teacher kicked off an Internet debate over fair use and copyright? :)