Participant Goals

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This page lists participants answers to these questions:

  • What would you like to get out of the event? What will make your time well spent?
  • What would you like to share and discuss with others?

Contents

Your thoughts here!

Paul Biondich, responding for OpenMRS

I think a quick way to summarize now is to say that OpenMRS is very much in a growth phase.

It's being implemented in a lot of places, and along with that comes the need for new features, and more implementation support. So our primary goal at this point is to grow the community.

We think it's important that a significant part of this growth comes from within Africa. We'd like to see coders, implementers, and in general, a community evolving around the developing world just as much as we have in the developed world.

So, we're always interested to learn how we can be better at this. How we could interest developers to work with our framework and become a part of our community. We have funds for 20 internships. I'm sure the other groups have more experience in this area than we do.

I think the main thing that we've learned as of late is that it's a mistake to limit the potential growth of our community to the "vertical market" in which we've traditionally worked: HIV care programs in developing countries. We've had a ton of interest from developers-at-large who just want to do philanthropic things with their time. So we're interested in reaching out to literally everyone in the world. We've been pleasantly surprised by who wants to be involved.

I think the primary challenges going forward are:

  1. growing efficiently
  2. keeping focus on our mission (a lot of people would like to see us become different things to benefit different constituencies)
  3. finding "the right" kind of people for our community

Have fun at the meeting, and sorry I couldn't be there!

Robert Kinuthia response

I am the project manager for Drumnet project run by PRIDE AFRICA

AS you know we have an open source system and as yet we do not understand its:

- Full capabilities and flexibilities

- Security features and how to enhance them

- Selecting a good administrator for OSS software as opposed to proprietary

- Risks of system crash,virus, hackers etc

Am a novice in OSS and have used SOP, production Planning and lately SAP before joining DrumNet

Dan Orwa's response

I would like to share my experiences on a workshop i attended along with others fro Kenya in May 2007, Turku Finland on FOSS.

I would also like to know what needs to be done to sensitize more Kenyans and Africa at large on FOSS. Currently many are hardly aware of the range of tools and potential benefits of FOSS versus proprietary software, moreso in out educational and public sector institutions.

I would suggest strengthening and harmonization of efforts to popularize FOSS so that we can all move together as one. Currently there are many disjointed initiatives especially in Kenya.


Dan Orwa School of Computing and Informatics, University of Nairobi dorwa@uonbi.ac.ke

Mark Steudel Response

  • I would like to see pros and cons of various FOSS business models out there and their sustainability in for profit environments

When/How do you achieve your ROI with FOSS methodology?

    • What are the up front resources needed to develop a FOSS project/Community buliding?
    • Is there a way to protect intellectual property? Is there a need?
  • I would like to see a comparison between the ability of closed software and FOSS development methodologies to quickly react to changing business needs and the nuts and bolts on how those needs would be communicated
  • What's the success of hybrid approach to FOSS, open source community and in house development working together

Chris Seebregts' Response

Related to Dan's comments above, I would like to see tis group explore possibilities for active collaboration between different FOSS initiatives to:

    • grow a collaborative network of cooperating nodes conversant in various open source and applicable technologies and able to apply these to regional requirements
    • identify opportunities for integration and interoperability between various relevant FOSS applications.

gunner's responses

  • I really want to listed to a broad range of free and open source software perspectives in the African context
  • I'm very excited to discuss community processes and developer recruiting.
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