As historic "core devs" move on, where do we go from here?

I think it’s worth pointing out that “core dev” does not mean the same thing as “experienced dev” (although of course for someone like Rafal it means both).

A “core dev” means someone who can work on “core OpenMRS priorities,” and the only thing it takes to do this is time and desire.

For example we plan to soon have a sprint to help people upgrade to later version of OpenMRS (see Proposing a sprint to help people upgrade to Platform 2.x (Mozambique tried to upgrade to Platform 2.x, but was blocked for various reasons)) As part of this I think we will need someone to upgrade the dataentrystatistics module so that it can support Platform 2.x. But someone actually needs to do this work, and so far people that have been connected to implementations have not considered it a priority. So anyone who wants to be a “core dev” can take this task up and work on it.

More generally, during our project management calls on Mondays, it would often come up “ah, someone needs to work on x, because this is a blocker for some project we’re tracking”, but we don’t have a way to say "if we add this to the list of ‘this month’s priorities’ then we can expect someone to pick it up and get it finished in the next month.

In a simplistic view, I’d say “we can’t do this because we haven’t hired enough core devs” but really the answer should be “in the OpenMRS community there are many people who could do this; one of them has time this months; we just need to communicate better”.

The thread is here: Sync 2.0 MVP testing. But it’s about finding an implementation to do the testing, not (yet) looking for individuals to test things out.

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