Monthly OpenLMIS Governance Committee Call. This meeting includes members of the governance committee, as well as anyone else interested in participating.

Time

7:00 - 8:00 AM PST - Seattle
10:00 AM to 12:00 PM EST - New York, DC
3:00 PM CET - Geneva, Copenhagen (4PM during daylight saving time of the year)
5:00 PM EAT - Dar (6PM during daylight saving time of the year)

Call Details

Join Zoom Meeting https://zoom.us/j/377281719

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Meeting ID: 377 281 719
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Action items for next call - Oct 13

Action Items Wesley Brown to facilitate discussion on this in upcoming Product Committee Meeting re FHIR standards and product catalogs; then can loop back to governance committee re: strategy/timelines

Notes

Topic

Who

Notes

Chat Captures

Introductions and Call opening (5 min)

Notes from July Governance call

August Notes

Carl Leitner

Welcome

Review agenda for this call

New OpenLMIS Features Guide

Carl Leitner

OpenLMIS Features Guide now available in English & French

Detailed description of feature set, complete with screenshots of reports

This should be your new "go-to" flyer that we share with stakeholders interested in OpenLMIS so please download. Available here: https://openlmis.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/OpenLMIS_FeaturesOverview_FINAL.pdf

Implementation Opportunities Update

Carl Leitner

As per the Implementation Opportunity Trello Board:

Info requests to the group today:

Any updates from CHAI re: eSwatini? (is this a confirmed green light or still working out details)?
- Nobody from CHAI on the call
- Kim did speak with Gaurav, sounded like it was very much in the works. 9 month project, not necc. Covid

Any updates from VR or JSI on Uzbekistan? (the last we heard they sent some budget-related follow up questions in June)
- Ashraf: received queries for budget. has been quiet since then. asked for update on status, but nothing received back. has been no indication of a selection with someone else.

Updates to the group:

The steward team recently conducted a demo meeting with consultant in Niger assessing OpenLMIS for EPI there
VR and JSI worked together to submit an implementation proposal in the Gambia and are awaiting feedback on this (funding for implementation from GF is pending)
Re: OpenLMIS COVID Edition:
- Conversations about implementation in DRC are encouraging (not finalized yet)
- Previous plans for implementation in Zimbabwe have been halted due to political turmoil (MoH was arrested for fraud which caused lots of upheaval and staff turnover from top to bottom)
  - Wes: not totally halted. need to figure out their requirement for local ISP
  - Lindabeth: who is funding?
  - Wes: Covid edition is funded by CHAI, but Zimbabwe has hardware for another project that was unused that can be leveraged. have four more months of funding
  - Lindabeth: Are they getting equipment from Bileeta? Unknown.

Workstream Update: Partnership search

Brian Taliesin & Kim Couri

Partnership to Handover Update

Pdf of slides presented:

2020-09-08 GC Meeting Update (1).pdf

review current pipeline
reflections on candidates?
Our shortlisting process
- (if time) deeper dive into shortlisted candidates, so everyone can get to know them
Next steps for final shortlisted candidates

Introduction to the Enterprise Support Model

Kim Couri Brandon Bowersox-Johnson (Unlicensed), Wesley Brown

insert updated slides

Q&A
questions/concerns re: country level planning/change management for this
Feedback on Tiered Model:

(Carl) URLs / cache
- (Wes) To get something up and running, implementations to get demo instance up and running. Not a PATH.openlmis.org? Could get a sub-domain but goal is the simplicity of getting it up and running quickly.
(Carl) Assuming potential partners have already been appraised of what’s going on with enterprise support model and would maintain it. Coming back to support levels, is that something that we would expect the partner to provide in-kind or dedicated resources to that level of support?
- (Kim) Yes, they’re familiar with it but we’ll need to go into more detail with them as part of the evaluation process and would consider this part of core.
(Kelly) Is it possible that country would not do standard support?
- (Brandon) Priority is to get all countries onto standard support. If countries don’t want that and say no, approach is to try to explain the value and importance and try as hard as we can this year to get everyone on board and build this into their budgets. Hope we have full compliance.
- (Kim) One exception is COVID editions given the crisis response mode.
(Carl) With 25K, if VR is not part of the implementation team, thinking about the exchange of funds, that has some transactional costs. Have you thought of ways to mitigate costs
- (Brandon) Great question. Most of the implementations VR doesn’t have a role, part of the discussion w/ 1:1 conversations. Flexible with how funds come through. Carl, do you have any ideas on transactional costs? Imagining in countries where VR doesn’t have any role in implementations, TPs do, build it into their annual budgets and VR can send invoice. Eager to hear ideas to simplify transactional costs.
- (Carl) Some charge overhead fee depending on cost, threshold may or may not be $25K. Other alternative is if there are orgs that provide the support that the maintenance fee is used for, also implementation partners, would be to figure out way to manage that without fiscal transfer up and back down. Would have to have transparency on implementation partner side as well.
(Jean) Share what we’ve observed w/ $25K charge. Received invoice for next year support fee and on top is $25K, one response is that we don’t have the budget in place but received the invoice. Work planning section, budget is way below what we thought, plus fee to add in the invoice from VR is high for us in one of the countries. Struggling stage to figure out how we can accept proposed invoice to support this effort. This is a challenge we are facing for the first country and may be a challenge for others as well. How can we overcome this? How do we get approval from the mission and then move it to the MOH? They say no way they’d have the money to sustain this in the future.
- (Lindabeth) Find that interesting, because when we do work planning we don’t get into enough detail to get into those numbers it’s more generalized. Concerned that it’s not a priority for PSM. Don’t think $25K is a big deal. We need to do more messaging around the importance of governance and being able to have a finger in maintenance pie to keep this going. The fact that countries are pushing back, relationship to what money countries have, something wrong with this. Need to dig in further.
- (Jean) Angola is only getting $125K, so $25K is a lot from that perspective.
(Carl) Don’t know if I’ve seen what the implementation costs are over a number of countries, is there a point where we have more of a graded support cost until we get to a certain threshold?
- (Kelly) I think we are way overcomplicating this, been through these budget processes. If there’s not enough funds through USAID, implementation partner and MOH, it is a prioritization problem. Our counterparts pay several thousand for accounting software, for excess warehousing space because they haven’t reprioritized how they’re putting their product away in warehouses. Would argue that PSM and mission and MOH could work together and find $25K a year.
- (Lindabeth) Understand Jean that you’re the messenger, but need to have a conversation about pushing the reset on priorities. Agree with Kelly. Might try to take it back within my team, specifically with country leads to make sure that they have a conversation w/ country team at large to make sure they’re clear on priorities.

AOB

Conferences and Meetings

Conferences provide the community the opportunity for OpenLMIS members to speak or represent the OpenLMIS software and community in public forum.

All

Upcoming (Virtual) Conferences for 2020 (let's add them here!)

Global Health Supply Chain Summit
- Nov 9-20th (virtual)
Global Digital Health Forum
- December 2020 (virtual)
- OpenLMIS core team submitted abstracts

Opportunities documentation

Definitions to use shared terminology:

Implementation opportunity: an opportunity for an implementation or deployment of the OpenLMIS software. Usually this is done at a national or sub-national level within a ministry of health. This can also include feature work which would be done within the implementation and contributed back to the global codebase.
Community opportunity: a funding opportunity to support an organization or individual to work directly on the global codebase and/or administrate the community processes. This may include funding specific features on the community roadmap.

Country implementation opportunities:

This Trello table is being updated on an ongoing basis; to help the core team to track and manage implementation opportunities, but also provides a detailed snapshot of the scope and status of current implementation opportunities for stakeholders.

Community Opportunities:

New Trello table! Similar to the above table, this tool is being used by the stewards to track our exploring of new product opportunities and partnerships

Study Tours:

Study Tours wiki page tracks applications received, study tours completed, and other key milestones related to OpenLMIS Study Tours (this activity is no longer active due to COVID-19)

Community and Product Updates

Product Updates

Community Updates

ATTENDANCE:

RECORDING AND CHAT TRANSCRIPT

Meeting Recording:

Topic: OpenLMIS Governance Committee
Start Time : Sep 8, 2020 06:56 AM

Meeting Recording:
https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/iMLzDCp1fwmeVLU7jKifyTaarXQWXAzxs5Grsc1i7TeRSDY_wpU3fjOPkyFwYVsb.RyN6HDvZCG6gLpEW

ADDITIONAL READING