Conference Report, Future Timelines and Call for Volunteers

[Anton de Winter]

Hi Everyone,

Last weekend many of us in the community attended the yearly OpenRosa conference that was held at Monkey Valley, Cape Town, South Africa.  It was a joint conference held with the folks from OpenMRS.   The people I've heard from had only good things to say about the weekend and it was generally very productive.  From an OpenRosa standpoint we made a lot of progress with respect to driving forward the API/Standards discussion, talking about the future of the community, live demonstrations to the OpenMRS attendees and those interested in Mobile Health, and much more.

I wanted to link everyone to the OpenRosa notes from the conference for future reference: http://wiki.openmrs.org/display/RES/OpenRosa+2010+Discussions  

The notes for the entire conference (both OpenRosa and OpenMRS) can be found here: http://wiki.openmrs.org/display/RES/2010+Implementers+Group+Meeting .  I strongly recommend you check out the "Singing Geeks of OpenMRS 2010" video ;)

As I mentioned above, there was a lot of discussion about the future of the group where we should be focusing our energy. With that in mind, we came up with some deadlines in order to push the community and get OpenRosa to a more concrete position.  Those deadlines concern getting a core API out (more details below), and having general elections for electing a OpenRosa Champion, who would ideally drive the community forward, raise funds as required and keep the community healthy as a whole.  The deadlines for these two events are:

• Oct 30 2010 - Core API completion deadline and new website up-and-running
• Jan 1 2011 - Send announcement about voting information
• Jan 15 2011 - Nominations Due
• Jan 30 2011 - Voting complete

More details about the voting process, who votes, candidate nominations, etc will be sent out as we get closer to January. Details are also available in the notes I linked above (under 'Models' on the OpenRosa discussion page).

Voting details summary:  

We would like to have a 'Champion' for OpenRosa.  

Someone who is: Interested in making sure the community grows, willing to raise funds for events (like our yearly conference), can facilitate discussions between various organizations that are part of OpenRosa, make sure we stick to community deadlines and help manage the overall vision for OpenRosa

It sounds like an enormous job, but this champion would be able to draw on the resources of the community and rely on others in order to spread the load.  The Champion is primarily the person that gets the ball rolling in these areas.

About the APIs: We would like to have a  core set of Standards or APIs, that any organization or group could apply to their software in order to become "OpenRosa Compliant".  Above and beyond that there will also be additional (more specialized) APIs that can be implemented at the developers discretion.  These APIs are being created with the goal of ensuring that the various turnkey components from different organizations are compatible and inter-operable.  Needless to say, having a core API and reference implementations of said API would be extremely useful to both implementers and developers alike (not to mention end users).

Finally, I would like to make a call for volunteers to help with the API discussions.  We have quite a list of APIs that need to be worked on.  Some are virtually complete and just need to be put to a vote, others need to be fleshed out more, some do not even have a skeleton framework yet.  Please have a look at the complete list located here: http://bitbucket.org/javarosa/javarosa/wiki/OpenRosaAPI .   We need some volunteers who would be willing to take the lead on specific APIs, making sure the document on the wiki remains in sync with the various discussion threads we'll be having on the openrosa-workgroup mailing list and keeping the ball rolling.  I'll personally be closely involved in these discussions and trying to make sure we remain on target for the deadlines, but additional help would definitely be appreciated!

Hopefully that covers everything.  If anyone has any questions or concerns please feel free to discuss it in this thread and/or email me directly.

Thanks for your time!

Anton