Class of 16 CS Seniors looking for something to help with

I am all for open collaboration , but coordinating a class to get work done in IRC is definitely difficult. I am o with using slack or a telegram channel , but the vote was on slack … Not a big fan of moving to semi private conversations but also realise that i dont have the bandwidth to followup critically on the openmrs IRC

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@michael and @pascal,

I understand the desire to be open and transparent - work that is done but hidden is of no use to the community. And people forget to communicate important discoveries back to the community (I’m constantly pushing the students to update the wiki pages where they are incomplete and the students figure out a missing step in some instructions.)

However, is there a point at which putting everything we do on an open channel becomes noise that makes it harder for people to see the signal? I think @judy has a fair point about not having the bandwidth to follow a class on IRC. (And some things will have to be private because of FERPA.)

So, I’m trying to figure out what the balance would be. Can you give me a idea of what kinds of communication you feel would be important to take place openly?

I could see continuing to use a thread on Talk for the semester. I don’t think the general IRC channel is right because it gets used for too many other things. I don’t know enough about Telegram yet, so I will investigate that and see what it provides.

I understand that Slack is a bad choice for anything that might help the community in the future. Would it make sense to use for Slack for scrum meetings? Or should those be on an open channel too?

We try to default all our communication to open and logged channels, and keep private only what absolutely has to be private. Talk would be fine I think, and all Telegram & IRC messages are cross-posted to each other. SCRUM meetings would be important to have public IMHO.

I haven’t run into the signal to noise ratio problem yet. Perhaps we could address that if it happens? Have your students introduced themselves?

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Yes, they all have.

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Since the radiology domain requires a lot of contextual knowledge I am pretty sure that I will not be trying to track messages on iRc. Slack seems to work for us for now . Telegram would be ok . Anything beyond that is tough to guarantee response from me

I strongly encourage team members to use either the #radiology tag on OpenMRS Talk for now, or if you anticipate many topics, we can create a subcategory under “Projects”.

Due to their proprietary & closed nature, please do not use tools like Slack or Skype for OpenMRS community projects.

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@michael and @pascal,

@judy and @kwurst are both saying that they want a way to efficiently chat with each other, and that the shared-by-everyone openmrs IRC channel is not okay for this.

If OpenMRS has a recommended mechanism for groups to set up publicly-visible sub-channels that don’t have all the chatter of openmrs, and have equivalent functionality to Slack/Skype so that people can see messages when they get online, then we should push people to use this. Otherwise, people need to use the appropriate tool that actually solves their problem (i.e. efficient communications between a specific group of people).

I would suggest we set the expectation that any project like this has to give a regular update on the openmrs channel. (I don’t know if that needs to be daily or weekly.)

So it could be that Telegram is the right tool, using the big OpenMRS conversation for daily/weekly updates, and a smaller group convo for specific team chat.

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thats exactly what we are looking for! Is it possible to set up a subgroup for the radiology module in telegram or irc? we are definitely for it being open to everyone working on the module.

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Yes, we do.

As previously mentioned, the community management team has discussed this, and encourages everyone working on the radiology module to start using a dedicated tag (or sub-category) on OpenMRS Talk for this purpose, and ensure the relevant people are “Watching” that category or tag so they are notified of activity.

We’ve had several OpenMRS community projects with sub-categories under Projects that have been using their group for the same focused conversation purposes.

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+1 …

There are general things we are reliant on OpenMRS tools – the wiki and that all the students work by assigning themselves tickets. There are lots of things lost in communication amongst a large group , and when efficiency is the main driver, then a hybrid of communication modalities is ok

Like i said Telegram / slack works for me , and we are committed to updating the community of our development and hopefully encouraging some of the students to be part of our work beyond the class

You could consider creating a #radiology channel on IRC. For example both AMPATH & bahmni have their own dedicated IRC channels.

May be this could work for you too?

No difference between IRC channel and slack channel

This issue is sorted for now . The agreement is encourage community sharing . A class is better Ina. Dedicated channel - telegram or slack works for me