February 16, 2016

Feedback and questions from the OpenLMIS Community Re-Architecture Webinar

Karl - Going to catch up with Sarah tomorrow to review the discussion held with BMGF. Wanted to highlight that conversation. Issue relates to some things that are relevant to the community in general. CHAI and ThoughtWorks had a call w/Gates to talk about the creation of a mobile, global application, used at the facility level, that would build off the work of CHAI in Mozambique. Gates agreed, but wants two groups to potentially work together during the re-architecture for more cohesion (or tying together into a single proposal). Gates also expressed several times that they'd like other donors to help assist with the initiative.

Feedback from Gates: Wanted the community to speak with one voice, especially when it comes to one code base.

Guarav - Gates also wanted to understand how everything works together in the timeline, and how it works into the overall roadmap.

Sarah - Had a call with Gates on Friday. How do we, as a community, speak with one voice about our priorities? (TZ, VAN, mobile front end product). Need to think about the re-architecture, how will you do this in coordination? Cultivating additional donors funding core development, or country implementation that generates functionality for core, is important to Gates.

Sarah - Did you get more feedback around this donor question?

Karl - No, not much. They just expressed that they'd like the community to work to source other donors and partners. They can't really evangalize OpenLMIS specifically.

Sarah - Prioritize diversifying funding as a community priority. Not just for core development, but for community participation, etc. This will require more coordination, and it's possible that the pace of other OpenLMIS feature development will slow down during this time. We need to be able to articulate a plan, first point is to decide on re-architecture or re-write.

Marasi - Other angle is we also have countries currently using eLMIS, and what happens to them? What is the plan for those who were critical in getting this initiative started and how do we keep them on board moving forward?

Sarah - Really the key topic. Presented some material during the webinar, and was hoping to get feedback from community, and any other questions or next steps.

Marasi - With respect to the re-architecture, what's most important for legacy countries is which features get toggled on/off. Those countries would love to take advantage of new modules - how do they do that? Another facet is long-term support. For the long-term viability of OpenLMIS, those are the fundamental questions.

Karl - Doesn't really make sense for the community to provide in-country support. I don't really understand the notion of country support.

Marasi - Tanzania example: Working to build support for an in-country stakeholder, but you could have a contract with another in-country partner without support from USAID or any other donor. Want to know where the support will come in to provide support to different levels of users.

Lindabeth - Have a concern. A significant amount of money has been spent via USAID. I fully agree that the initiative needs to have modules, but I'm worried that USAID is about to lose a significant amount of investment if there is no support or path for legacy countries. I'm unhappy that we might turn off, or lose that in the core code.

Karl - If we take what has been learned from these country deployments and use that to develop a more flexible version, while continuing to allow patches and maintenance on the legacy countries, I don't see how the USAID investment is being lost, it's being leveraged. You don't need to use the same lines of code, there are many pieces of software that have been re-written several times. In the case of a new version of OpenLMIS, whether it's an incremental re-architecture, or a full re-write, there will be a cost for a migration. Main decisions countries would have to make is whether the migration cost is traded off against the new features and extensibility.

Marasi - For long-term support, we're looking at how it could be more affordable, and also at in-country institutions. But for a while they would need to leverage expertise and get support. Are there any costs developed for re-writing the whole system (donor perspective)? That way costs to countries to upgrade could be estimated. To see the entire economics of the situation.

Sarah - From the donor perspective, we're working on those costs over the next month. We should have that shortly. Interesting question about the costs from a country perspective. Cost will vary depending on the scale of the implementation, as well as the level of customization (features) that are in the implementation. Also a piece around how the data is being used. We'll provide data migration scripts and support. Agree that LOE to upgrade should be minimized. Country by country, in partner with the implementing partner for that country.

Karl - Better to think about LOE instead of cost. Effort is more neutral than cost.

Ashraf - This has added a bit of confusion to the overall approach. Might even take more than one year and require more effort. Can we find a way for this to be less disruptive? Other countries were considering eLMIS, but they are now perhaps reconsidering because the OpenLMIS product is going to change, requiring another investment. Either approach will require some additional LOE. The issue that, overall, the investment we've made,

Sarah - There may not be an easier, less painful way to do this. There will be consequences that will come out of this, if we decide those costs are too great then we can reconsider country-by-country. We also have new implementations in mind, and that is the charter of this group. If there aren't other implementations that are the target for this, we do have the data for the countries which have implemented. If there's a target country for implementing this, that would help ground the project.

Marasi - Would like to have a more focused conversation around the pros and cons around this. Gates and USAID plan to talk.

Lindabeth - We're trying to get together, but we haven't gotten any leverage on this yet. We don't have a lot of extra funding for this year from USAID for this. There aren't any countries jumping at the chance to do a re-architecture, but I'd like to talk with Gates about

Karl - Can we put together a clear description of a bandaid approach that would say what the current primary pain points are and how to tweak this so things may not need support?

Sarah - Are you saying, don't do the re-architecture? Or a bandaid for what could be done in a specific country that's more minimal in terms of LOE? Please send the question to the community list

Mattias - Want to second what Karl said. It was presented as a done decision at the webinar. Want to consider something that doesn't orphan version 2.0 and doesn't cause any concerns about whether now is the time to implement, or not, etc. Unclear what the next steps would be, but there are now a couple proposals that Gates is looking at, and USAID/Gates need to have a conversation as well. Do we need to have a larger conversation with us and donors? Who ultimately makes the decision about what will happen next and when does that happen?

Sarah - The community is the decision makers (gathered in September 2015). From the Gates perspective, they are very concerned about the fact that the architecture right now makes it very challenging to invest, and have that investment bring benefit to multiple countries. There are ways to meet these concerns, but Gates has a strong concern around this, and want to focus on re-architecting to address this problem. The conversation between USAID and Gates would be a good way to clarify. The two things driving priroties are what the community wants, and what the donors want. Next steps: Still proceeding with the decision that we need to re-architect to move forward. We're gathering feedback, and VR will put together a recommendation. Start by gathering feedback, and work toward getting Lindabeth and Gates together to discuss.

Ashraf - We feel that we haven't been consulted when VR came up with the different options. We feel that we would have added a different option. Countries may need to look for different funding, could take 3-4 years.

Sarah - That's fair. Right now we're in that process. Let's take this opportunity now to discuss alternatives. And if you have other ideas around approaches, articulate them. The incremental approach takes a chunk at a time and keeping everyone together through the process. The whole focus of that approach was slower, starting with the code base that we have.

Karl - If countries are happy with their current system as-is, you can continue to do small enhancements and bug fixes to that version, and keep it. They're not obligated to migrate - you only migrate if the cost of migration is lower than the benefit you get.

• Tenly Snow (Deactivated) to compile key concerns and post on wiki
• Sarah Jackson (Deactivated) to compile action items and next steps and communicate to community
• Lindabeth Doby to schedule call with Gates Foundation