Monthly OpenLMIS Governance Committee Call. This meeting includes members of the governance committee, as well as anyone else interested in participating.
Time
7:00 - 8:00AM PST - Seattle
10AM to 11AM EST - New York, DC
4:00PM CEST - Geneva, Copenhagen*
5:00PM EAT - Dar*
*Please note the updated meeting time in CEST and EAT timezones and the update call-in info below
Expressed excitement to work with JSI and Ona, and also recognizes that there will be challenges. We're all excited to demonstrate that we can collaboratively build features in an efficient way.
Reason for the work: Harmonize versions and provide a potential upgrade path for Tanzania and Zambia
Diversification of the OpenLMIS developer base
Moving the developer center of gravity to Africa
Reviewed phases, deliverables, and timelines
Showed global distribution of development and management teams
Reviewed draft team composition
Can't have fully staffed teams at each organization, understanding how shared services will work between the teams
Opportunities:
More organizations contributing to core development
Investment in building expertise across organizations
Opportunity for other organizations to implement/support v3
Conversations around additional funding (Data Use Partnership and USAID TZ)
Challenges
Had hoped for fully staffed teams - not enough funding
Coordination - Across multiple teams, similar expertise
Feature definition - Can be challenging process, not all existing features will be the best way to solve user needs. May need new features.
Balance - Balancing goals of competing features and supporting community processes
Question: Would other organizations be involved in OpenLMIS implementation projects or just core development?
Yes, a mix of both. May be involved in both
Kyle: When we say "focused on OpenLMIS" are we referring to core development or to implementations?
MJ: What Carl was asking - this refers to all organizations and a mix of activities. The other teams may have other projects unrrelated to OpenLMIS. The core team that VR has historically supported are not fully funded on this project. With additional funding we'll still have those four dedicated members, but outside of that we can't speak to everyone (Ona, JSI, etc.)
Jake: It is our hope though that getting people spun up on v3 architecture that they could go after those. By growing the number of software devs that are "fluent" in this architecture there would be a larger implementer pool to draw from. Definitely a by-product that we want. We want JSI and Ona to be able to go after implementations using version 3. Just as VR used SolDevelo to backstop the Malawi implementation, then JSI or Ona could take the lead.
Ashraf: JSI provides support tangentially to OpenLMIS through eLMIS.
Carl: From my perspective I think this is a good thing to have a mixture of core and impleemntation work. Helps "ground" that core work and specific country requests. There could be positive effects. Can talk more about how to balance this.
Kyle: Wants to talk more about this, specifically about implementations and linking lessons learned back to the global community.
It's Kyle's prefernce from past experience, provides great insight for programmers to learn specific challenges during implementation. Should really look at that model.
1 - implementation expereience, challenges
2 - implementation perspective: important to understand and limit the forking of country instances. Devs need to have experience in both places
3 - country perspective: responsiveness to challenges, bugs, etc.