Breaking down walls and attracting more devs to OpenMRS

[burke (Burke Mamlin)]

@sidvaish97,

Thank you for your thoughtful post. I hope you don’t mind that I pulled it out of Brandon’s topic on module maintenance conventions. While your post strayed off topic in that thread, I think you make some great points and I wanted to make sure we had space to discuss this.

@sidvaish97

Now if a beginner tries to ask a question via Personal Message [PM] to a community member, they can’t because they don’t have the access to do that (a /dev level is required to do so). For a beginner to be able to ask a question they’ll atleast have to spend few days reading posts on TALK which is totally acceptable and logical but for a beginner to stick with a community in the very initial days is very tough I guess.

This doesn’t actually have to do with /dev stages; rather, it’s a built-in feature of Discourse to ensure visitors to the forum have engaged with the community a bit (built up a level of trust) before they start PM’ing folks.

@sidvaish97

If one tries to setup their environment themselves then also it is almost impossible (unless he/she is an experienced developer) to set it up because none of our wiki pages explains / provides working links on how to install MySQL 5.6 and Java 8 on Linux, Windows or Mac. It was almost impossible for me to install such an old version of MySQL on my machine. But hopefully we’ll get out of this problem soon because I can see developers working on it.

We need to introduce you to my good friend Docker. The days of installing and managing different versions of software natively are behind us. With Docker installed, a command for installing MySQL 5.6 and running on your machine (regardless of OS) is:

docker run -d -p 3306:3306 -e MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=secret mysql:5.6

@sidvaish97

One more thing which a beginner (or at least I face during my initial days) that there are so many confusing names which we use very frequently inside the community but they might not make sense for a beginner. Few examples Reference application , OpenMRS SDK , OpenMRS Distribution , OpenMRS Platform . And the versions are a lot more confusing.

Could you take a look at om.rs/gettingstarted and see if there are some ways it could be improved to overcome the challenges you’ve identified? Would a link to om.rs/glossary or specific edits/updates to the om.rs/devmanual help?

@sidvaish97

One Android client specific thing which demotivates beginners is the Demo server. Most of the times its down which makes it impossible for a beginner to login to the OpenMRS App. I understand there might be a problem which causes this but a beginner can never imagine that there might be a problem from the community side, they always blame themselves for it.

This type of detail is important. The uptime for most of our infrastructure is now 99.99%. The demo server is 88.69%, but that is only checking that the web page responds and may not reliably reflect actual uptime. I’ve just modified our uptime check to simulate a login via the REST API, so it should more accurately reflect uptime. Perhaps we could have a virtual hackathon to identify & address specific issues that are reducing the demo server’s reliability.

Also, the Android client could be adapted to alter it’s error message when the server URL contains “demo.openmrs.org” to help the user (e.g., a tip like “Check demo.openmrs.org and/or status.openmrs.org and make sure the demo site is running.”)

@sidvaish97

OpenMRS community should have a more approachable and at the same time professional chat platform like Gitter or if not this atleast we should make our existing platforms more engaging. I know OpenMRS is on Telegram and Slack but on Telegram I can only see bot messages and nothing else. This would help beginners to get a easy start.

It might be time to retire or at least stop advertising Telegram. I think most community chat is happening in IRC or Slack these days. The challenge with chat clients is there’s always the shiny new one and they all have pros & cons. We need matrix.org to take over the world and connect all chat clients so we don’t have to choose.

@sidvaish97

I think OpenMRS also lacks on the documentation part. It can be a case that all the modules don’t need maintenance as we have shifted to more sophisticated technologies but it’s better to add a Depreciation Notice or something similar (like supported by versions below 2.0.x etc) in the readme of every module.

This sounds like great grist for the documentation teams to take on.

@sidvaish97

Also it will be nice if we can provide links to download MySQL, JAVA, Maven versions which actually works with OpenMRS. Some newer getting started tutorial videos will also be nice.

This might be useful for new GSoC students as well. /cc @suthagar23

@sidvaish97

I am at /dev/1 stage and pointing out so many things might not be something I should do. Just trying to help make the OpenMRS community better. Sorry for the wall of text.

Bless you for your willingness to share constructively. It’s a beautiful wall you’ve built. I hope @jennifer gets a chance to admire your wall too.