Dec 17th, 2019

Introductions and Call opening (5 min)

• Notes from November Governance call

November Notes

Welcome

Review agenda and objectives for this call

Debrief about recent Cameroon Study Tour to Malawi- successful tour and discussions for CHAI to support a pilot are ongoing. Plan to start prepping for pilot (requirements gathering and advocacy with other national stakeholders) in Q1 & Q2 of 2020

Senegal tour approved and on track for early 2020; after this we will need to do expenditure analysis to see if sufficient funds remain for a 3rd visit

Vaccines were driving the need for the focus on supply chain in Cameroon; UNFPA is interested as well as Global Fund

Philippines- any news on Phillipines RFP? (JSI attended expo and were waiting for it to drop)

• Ashraf is tracking this; MSH (MTaPS) project is in charge of this; govt procurement process is taking longer than anticipated; DoH is trying to figure out a process to allow for international procurement process to comply with requirement to use a locally registered company; MSH is working with DoH to make allowances for this

Yemen WFP- WFP contacted us via Info@ to gauge our interest in an implementation of a commodities tracking system to use in Yemen for their supplies and medicines. Partners JSI, SolDevelo and VillageReach expressed interest in exploring this and held an introductory call on Nov 20th to learn more about their requirements, timeline and interest. They plan to issue an RFP asap

(Brandon) *opportunities in the pipeline- need clear language on this idea of existing implementations paying in for moving forward; need to flag that we need to prioritize this effort; jointly come up with mechanism; don't want this to appear to be a taxing burdeon on implementations; need to showcase benefits of this.

(Carl) Potential language that we could use is to look at having 'support contracts' built into our proposals; any unused of that retainer rolls into core software support. This could be pallatable for countries because they are getting something out of it. Ashraf agrees this is a good idea.

(Ashraf) could say they would be automatically entitled to future upgrades without paying anything extra

(Wes) Wasn't sure how to approach an opportunity with a new customer coming online who might want new features. Want to create a consistent and compelling message to share with future partners. Do we have the mandate/means to continue to evolve OpenLMIS beyond basic maintenance  

eSwatini- any updates on this RFI from PSM?

(Ashraf): Parambir says the country office does not intend to issue an RFP on this one. Rebecca can reach out to Parambir or Pardon on this one

Uzbekistan- Proposed vaccine logistics system by UN. Why didn't people go for this one?

-(Ashraf): language was a barrier for this opportunity; did not have Russian speakers or partners to work with. They also wanted procurement planning and forecasting for vaccines. Without a local partner to bridge those gaps it was not worth going for

• (Carl) Need to identify local partners has been a consistent challenge
• (Brandon) issue was not having technical resources on the ground near uzbekistan. This is a rough relationship to make in a hurry with quick deadlines. This is an area we need to keep talking about (how do we keep growing our sales channels?) 

Global Fund planning- workplans are due in March for next round of funding (3 years)

-Have folks been contacted about wanting to integrate OpenLMIS into plans for the next 3 years? How can we support you all to support countries with these conversations?

-Here are some materials you can point interested countries to:

OpenLMIS_GettingStartedGuide_FINAL_SinglePgs.pdf

Introduction to OpenLMIS_2019.pdf

other resources here: OpenLMIS Marketing Materials

Updates from PCMT, GDHF and/or Global Goods meeting in DC 

(5 min)

Global Goods meeting: presented to donors a Roadmap of investments from Digital Square; articulate framing around UHC as a way to unlock resources; can link to health insurance space as a way to achieve UHC; can look at claims data as a way to link to supply chain

Donors: Gates, CDC, World Bank, Unicef, USAID

PCMT workshop: folks from GS1 and many other digital health stakeholders, country delegations from Ethiopia, Rwanda, Malawi, Ghana. 

Country priorities were identified. Ethiopia and Rwanda are actively pursuing product catalog.

Work will continue into 2020 for PCMT; slides and photos: link from the workshop; also see PCMT Introduction materials

(Lindabeth); spoke with Matthew Cartoe  who works on traceability at The Global Fund at traceability meeting last week; they still don't see the benefit for the GDSN themselves; they will tell their PSAs exactly what they need to buy and are not in sync with how they could exchange data with these national product catalogs. How can we convince them that this is important? Brandon Bowersox-Johnson is interested in speaking more to Lindabeth more about how this helps the Global Fund. Carl Leitner can help with this too →need a seperate side meeting for this. Ashraf is also interested in being part of this conversation

Resonance's contract is finished; their work is complete.

OpenLMIS Sustainability Final Report Handover.pdf

Anyone can view the full catalog of all their deliverables from the past year here on the wiki

divided their work in 3 areas: market research, business models, and transition planning

Future plans to share this work: Global Goods webinar in late January

Brandon Bowersox-Johnson

Wesley Brown

Rebecca Alban (Unlicensed)

Main takeaways from meeting: (Details and outputs from sessions are summarized on the OpenLMIS Community Meeting wiki page)

• consensus around pursuing 'partnership to handover model' - least risky and potential learning experience that other global goods can benefit from
• precise terms of any future partnership are not clear yet, but the meeting served as a critical step in identifying what the community found important to retain, such as:
  • Current and future community members need to have opportunity to engage in implementations and won’t be required to upsell any commercial product
  • continued support/enhancement the 'free' OpenLMIS (as opposed to OpenLMIS+ or a version for private health); if there is a paid version, then the 'free' version should benefit from it
  • countries remain in control of their data and it is shared only on terms they agree to; and preferably benefit from

Next steps for us as a community:

• Exploratory phase: OpenLMIS is exploring public private partnership models that will enable us to continue supporting our open source product and public health mission
  • Terms of any new partnership will stay true to our community goals and principles, as well as ensure that current and future implementations receive continued support
  • Question: Might we want to solidify/consolidate our value statement to articulate our community vision? we have a general mission and vision on website but might want more detail?
• Secure funding for exploratory phase from Gates Foundation
• Identify stakeholders/participants for exploratory phase; possibly still getting contributions from Resonance 

Exploratory Phase

Based on agreement at the OpenLMIS Community Meeting in November 2019, these are the areas for exploration:

1. Partnership to Handover - Subcommittee/Working Group
   1. Explore handover partnership options to find shared value aligned with community must-haves / nice-to-haves
   2. Identify other shared value or synergy with private sector products and services
   3. Test OpenLMIS subscription opportunities with private clinics, hospitals, pharmacies
2. Data Sharing and Value of Data - CHAI analysis contributes into this workstream
   • Explore data sharing agreements with country stakeholders
3. Public Health - Kelly/BMGF and Lindabeth/USAID
   • Coordinate with current and new implementations to establish annual fee for maintenance/support and country implementation input into priorities
4. Community Engagement - Digital Square and DIAL OSC
   • Shift the community engagement model; e.g. define Trusted Partner roles in future state; revisit 3 committees
   • Local/regional capacity building for support and development

For discussion: mechanics of approaching new partnership 

-How do we move from ideas to action? Propose a small focused group to lead charge assessing new partners and negotiating terms (ie: a 'working group' or 'sub-committee') and empower them to make decisions on behalf of the community to make sure we can move quickly

-need a governance vote to create a working group to operationalize the our business plan over the next 6 months (non-votes don't count, need 2/3 majority)

Propose: Rebecca Alban (Unlicensed) to send an email to vote on the establishment of the committee itself. A seperate process to determine who is on the committee (could be formal or informal; might be based on interest). The email can also solicit votes for the formation of the committee, and also solicit who is interested in  being a delegate from each organization

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 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.

• 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