March 12, 2019

Introductions and Call opening

• Notes from February Governance call

February Notes

We received very limited votes and were not able to reach a conclusion- is there an issue?

Kaleb: Traditionally haven't seen Empower as a service provider. Are there expectations around their skillsets?

This could lead to a larger question around roles of Trusted Partners in general

Intake form- look for skillsets that we are looking for. what capabilities that they have that they can contribute? 

Proposal for future votes: 'No' votes should be accompanied with an explanation of why (this will remain confidential but be informative for the steward team)

Because we are in long transition period its hard to know what skillsets will be needed

Next step: Rebecca to re-circulate slides, and share recording. Identify secondary points of contacts for each voting member so they can follow up

Future No votes for voting on any Trusted Partner should include explanations- Brandon agrees and supports this idea

Request status updates from Trusted Partners re:

Cameroon- Gaurav/CHAI: There is a new Minister of Health so there it's in a bit of a holding pattern.

Gambia- JSI and CHAI reached out with indicative budget for 'vanilla' 3.x implementation. Their requirements were not clear  

Zimbabwe RFP- JSI considered it, but given the requirements and the timeline they were asking for it was not a good fit. CHAI, VR & SolDevelo partnered for an application. Were expecting to hear back on the 28th of Feb

Zambia eSCMIS- Any confirmed responses, other than JSI?

Dominica RFP- No submissions from JSI

Recent opportunity in Benin announced-- I reached out to WAHIT (West Africa team of software developers in informatics experts) to see if they are interested in supporting any OpenLMIS partners since they are local and have French language skills

*Different model of supporting implementations?

Brandon suggests: Do we want to create a $10,000 package where we install the basic system and do a week long workshop, pull in local tech vendors. Give people a bit of knowledge and a starting point. This would be a good model of getting started. We have a lot of inquiries of people who want to use our software who cant pay full price. Maybe the offering that we have is not what the clients want.

Craig- want to be cautious and know that there is a larger sustainability conversation. A fully sustainable solution that is locally owned and will function in the long term

Kaleb: What are our overarching goals? Market-share? Market presence? less countries/more people? this will help us to define our strategy to define our 'package of services'. We want to make sure to maintain our reputation and undermine brand perception of quality of OpenLMIS

Wes: would be helpful to start thinking about after 3.6/get feedback from implementing partners→ wes can lead a conversation about this in the next governance meeting

Carl: is finding a new local partner an issue? should we create tool/guideline for finding local organizations? Gaurav: Yes, not knowing the quality of the local organizations are is always unclear. When it seems an opportunity is promising in terms of level of interest of the inquiry- they don't seem to be well prepared in terms of knowing what they want and how much funds they have for it. Timelines tend to be unrealistic. What is missing is an understanding of what it takes to implement an LMIS on the ground. Ashraf agrees with this assessment. RFPs have been very poorly designed- usually ask for EVERYTHING and don't have the funds 

How can we ensure there are better RFPs? Is this something we can share with the inter-agency supply group and other groups to ensure a better understanding of costs and implementation scenarios. Can find channels through GAVI, Unicef, etc. 

Next Steps Rebecca Alban (Unlicensed) to share draft of Getting Started Guide and continue this conversation in our next governance meeting

Resonance Project Update

• May Business Planning Workshop (May 21-22, Washington DC): The workshop will be held over two full days; day one will focus on narrowing business models and alignment around a way forward and day two will focus on developing tactics (e.g., 30, 180, 360 day plan) for the OpenLMIS future state. Resonance is currently conducting market research and gathering customer data to further flesh out the business models previously discussed
• Market Sounding: Resonance will send two teams to Africa and Asia in early to mid-April to gather in-country information about customer, partner, and business model feasibility. We are planning to conduct interviews and site visits in Rwanda, South Africa, Bangladesh, and Vietnam; we would appreciate recommendations and referrals to any relevant contacts
• Webinars: After the market sounding trips, Resonance will hold a series of webinars in late April to early May to solicit feedback from Governance Committee members on a business model specific prior to the workshop. Resonance will share more information and webinar sign-ups in the coming weeks

Proposal from Resonance to move May call to May 7th (from May 14th) and to extend to 90 minutes- want some extra time with the governance committee leading up to the May workshop. Should we create an additional meeting or combine this exercise with our existing May meeting? 

Rebecca Alban (Unlicensed) to schedule a new meeting on May 7th for Resonance

• Concept Note for OpenLMIS Study Tour Funding

OpenLMIS Representation in the Digital Health Atlas

https://digitalhealthatlas.org/en/-/   There is a map that stakeholders can scan to see what digital health technologies are being used in each country.

Linkages to the Global Good Guide Book (Carl Leitner to describe)

Consensus needed on who the contact/focal person for each implementation should be. 

How is it being used? Donors want to know a foot print of a solution (how scaled is it).  Additionally if anyone wants to learn more about the solution, they will want a contact which can provide that information.

Option 1) Each implementing organization is listed as the contact. If we have each implementing organization serve as the point person, we want a way to say they are all OpenLMIS.

Option 2) We list info@openlmis.org as the contact, so inquiries come to the Community Manager. If we have info@openlmis.org be the point for each implementation, we will need a way to keep it updated (right now we don’t know all the information about the scale of the solution in each country.

VOTE

Rebecca will be travelling during April call

Proposal from Resonance to move May call to May 7th (from May 14th) and to extend to 90 minutes

Conferences and Meetings

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

Opportunities Roundtable

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.

• 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:

• Machine Learning assets with Google- utility of AI for predicting facility consumption. Licensing questions being investigated with help of DIAL
• Data Collection and Analysis https://wiki.digitalsquare.io/index.php/Data_Collection_and_Analysis
• Discussions with Pharmaccess re: contributing to digital marketplace for pharmaceuticals -/wiki/spaces/OP/pages/493715868 
• Possible collaboration with Manta Ray Media on Gates proposal for NTDs- /wiki/spaces/OP/pages/509052192

To discuss in a future call:

Interoperability

What is our strategy for interoperability?

strategy for fostering connections with other orgs: for example: TransIT

link to documentation in 3.5 about interoperability

what will be impactful for the countries we work in? high level strategic discussion