Most of you have heard of OpenMRS Inc, the non-profit organization designed to support the OpenMRS community in its mission to improve healthcare delivery in resource-constrained environments.
As a non-profit organization, OpenMRS Inc has a Board of Directors who provide guidance to the organization and ensures that we as a community adhere to our mission, vision, and values.
Our current board has five active seats. One of these seats has been designated for a community representative, elected by the community every two years. This seat goes to the community member you feel will bring real world perspectives and fresh thinking to our collective work, the community member who is committed to OpenMRS’ long term success and feels comfortable challenging the rest of us to be similarly committed, the community member who has the kind of insights that will remind us of the real needs of the countries we serve.
The Community Representative is expected to attend all board meetings (virtually) and support communication between the community and the BoD.
The end of December will bring an end to Steve Wanyee’s term as our current Community Representative - and it’s now time to elect a new Community Representative.
Do you know someone who can represent our community on the OpenMRS Inc Board of Directors? Might you be that person?
We’d like to hold a vote during OMRS21 in early December. Please use the form below to nominate someone (including yourself!) to serve our community in this role by November 18, 2021. We’ll then review the nominations at the S&O meeting, share them with the board, and give everyone some time to prepare before the vote.
A quick update on where we are and what happens next with our 2021 OpenMRS Board of Directors Community Member Elections.
In early December…
Several of you had nominated six potential candidates for the open Community Representative seat on the Board of Directors
We reached out to these six individuals to confirm their willingness to serve in this role. By December 10, four responded positively to being on the ballot and two declined.
Each of the four candidates were asked to submit a Candidate Statement. These statements are now published in alphabetical order on the Wiki
What happens next?
Vote! Any member of the OpenMRS community with an OpenMRS Talk/Slack ID who has been active in the last two years will be sent a ballot. Each individual who votes may only submit one ballot and will have until 15 January 2022 to do so.
We use a ranked-choice voting system, so individuals can rank candidates in the order of their choice (1st choice, 2nd choice, 3rd choice, 4th choice).
All submitted ballots remain anonymous. Only the final result of which nominee received the most votes will be made public. In the event of a tie, we’ll hold a run off.
@jennifer what happened to the candidates who were nominated more recently? Were these simply discounted due to the deadline mentioned in your previous talk post?
Yes @grace, there were a couple nominations made after the deadline for nominating folks (announced above as Nov 18th). Unfortunately, these new nominations were provided long past the deadline and the work for the election was already well underway with the candidates nominated on time. So we cannot include them in this BOD term’s election. I do hope that folks consider nominating them again in the next election!