As OpenMRS has matured, the community has recognized an increasing need for strategic as well as operational work. As a result of this, there was a suggestion to replace the weekly leadership meeting with alternating strategic and operational meetings. As always, these meetings would be open to all members of the community to join and participate in, and decision making will use a consensus model.
The strategic meetings would focus on the medium and long-term organization goals of OpenMRS. The agenda will include discussions about priorities (including endorsement of the annual operational plan), global goods, our relationship with external organizations, financial viability and other strategic discussions.
The operations meetings would focus on topics such as review and assessment of the operational plan, preparations for the annual meeting, submission of needed write-ups (such as the recent Global Goods submission), a plan and oversight to update the website, operational technical support, development of operational processes (SOPs), and some expenditure decisions. These meetings would primarily be ‘working’ meetings. Our hope is that this model will allow us to more efficiently and effectively meet both our operational and our strategic/aspirational goals by facilitating increased community engagement in areas of interest.
We look forward to your participation in any or all of these areas that may interest you. Our goal is to initiate this schedule with the meeting on April 19 focused on operations based on the communities feedback. The meeting on April 26 would be a strategy meeting. We would continue to publish the agenda on talk at least a day before the scheduled meetings. Meetings would remain on Thursdays at the current time.
Please let us know your feedback and ideas. We would evaluate this change in July to see if it has been more effective if we implement it. Thanks for your comments !