Welcome to Baobab Volunteers!
Mike McKay
already it will be hard to keep up with you guys! But I did want to say
thanks to everyone who attended my presentation and especially those
that asked questions and talked to me afterwards. The response was very
encouraging. I am super excited about what this means for Baobab and
Malawi in general. I am looking forward to figuring out how we can all
pitch in our collective resources and improve the state of health care
in Malawi.
I would like to take Frank up on his hosting offer. I think there are a
number of things that we could use it for, but I think setting up a live
demo of our system is a great idea. It will give all of you an
opportunity to use our application which I am sure will lead to many new
ideas (there have already been some cool discussions about how to create
or improve visually representations of data).
Our current website is running on a slicehost in the states - it is not
a terribly great website, mostly because its layout is boring and we
don't update it enough. There are currently two designers in the states
who are inspired by what we do and are creating some logos and layouts
for a new website. I am not sure what the next step will be - but we'll
cross that bridge when we get there. That said, I do encourage you to
poke through our website. The top post on the website provides some
links that give an overview about what Baobab is doing and where we have
been.
I have heard that some of you stopped by #baobab yesterday - that's
awesome for those of you who didn't get the irc info:
irc: #baobab on freenode
Some other things for my todo/wish list:
* Get the URL for svn checkout
* Tests, tests tests! (Figure out rspec)
* Work with Oliver (aka b0nd) to get capistrano going (perhaps setting
up the demo site will be a good opportunity?)
* Figure out how to do continuous success testing (an idea I have to
figure out if things are working as we expect them to in the clinic.
Success means we should see at least 10 clients before 8:30 am, that
every patient who appears at reception should see a nurse, etc etc. I
want to build reports/tests that notify us early when something looks
like it is wrong)
* Migrate from lighttpd to nginx with mongrel
Nina
Specify a commit policy for the project. Do we have a patch system?
How does that work, exactly?
Figure out how to game Twitter so we can send out text messages to
patients (Twitter is free in Malawi and Mike has permission from the
twitter guys to use this to Baobabs advantage). It would be great is
all patients get a text the night before an appointment, as a
reminder, and patients that don't show up gets another text reminder.
Use localize to make the application speak the local language.
Somehow geotag the patients. We could do cools things like a map that
indicates where the patients are which might suggest sites for where
to deploy the system first. Maybe it's not so useful, but it is cool.
This is something I came up with: register which patients know
eachother. Every time a patient comes in they get asked if they know
one patient from their own village or area. Over time we can build up
a "buddy" network, maybe arrange that friends come to the clinic on
the same days so they have company when they travel, and we can use
buddies to follow up on patients that don't show up. I don't know if
this is legal, i.e. registering who knows eachother, but the
possibilities are endless.
:-)
Nina
Christoph Olszowka
I'd like to introduce myself, too. I've visited the session at RailsConf
and found it amazing and inspiring. I told Mike afterwards that I'd
really like to help in some way in the development of the project.
I am a Rails developer from Hamburg, Germany and have experience with
creating (huge) RESTful apps, TDD, custom scaffoldings for the
administration of large data sets, meta-programming in general and so
on. Prior to working with Rails (which I have for maybe 1 1/2 years), I
worked mainly with PHP and a little bit of Struts.
I would be glad if I could pick up some development tasks, especially
making the applications RESTful to get closer to having a central
Data Warehouse for stats etc., as this was mentioned during the session
at RailsConf.
I hope that with the offered hosting it will be possible to get a
working SVN as well as a project management solution like Trac to
have a platform where developers can discuss issues and create tickets
to track the features that are currently being worked on.
Greetings,
Christoph Olszowka
Mike McKay schrieb:
jacqui
First of all, I'm so glad that this project exists. The work you all
are doing is important and I think it's awesome that Baobab has been
able to reach out to a group as active and intelligent as the Rails
community is. The response is inspiring and I hope it keeps up.
I've been doing web development and/or systems administration for
about twelve years now, and I started working with Ruby and the Rails
framework at the end of last year. I love traveling, and I think that
working on solutions to problems in public health is not only a noble
cause but a challenging one on intellectual and technical levels as
well. I've also long been interested in going to Africa. I was
actually just starting to plan a trip to Tanzania when I heard about
this project and the work that is going on in Malawi nearby. So...
while I would love to work on localisation and other features that
could advance the health care situation, I'd also love to hear about
your experiences working and living there.
Who knows, maybe we can have a Team Baobab climb Kilimanjaro?
There hasn't been much activity on this list in the past five days -
are plans still in the works for setting up an SVN repository, Trac,
etc.?
I look forward to learning more about the project and all of you,
Jacqui Maher
On Sep 26, 8:06 am, Christoph Olszowka <christ...@rails-