Improving the OMRS Scholarship Process

[jennifer (Jennifer Antilla)]

Excellent points and ideas all around!

@k.joseph

some recent dev/2 or dev/3s may also be good having entire sponsorships than being denied portions of the package when in most cases they may not be able to afford for themselves extra funds which in some cases dev/4s or dev/5s can

I believe one of them does cover all of the costs associated with attending the conference, with the exception of meals not included in the conference package. We know it can be difficult for students in particular to cover all of the costs, so what do we think about offering a special student plan?

@k.joseph

BTW some experienced good implementer’s around may not even be close to dev/2 so we need to strike a balance when insisting on dev stages lest we miss these great people who are most likely to bless these implementer’s meetings.

I prefer to expand access to scholarships rather than limit it, so I would not insist on anyone going through the dev levels in order to apply for or receive a scholarship. When I look at the dev (and omrs) levels, I see a list of ways that people can contribute to the community - and that we can re-use as a checklist for the scholarship application process. We could also give applicants an option to share their dev or omrs level and tell us if they are interested in being upgraded. Or we could leave out all reference to the dev or omrs levels. Perhaps we need to put up a strawman application form to see how well this would work.

@ball

Since this is the OpenMRS Implementers Conference, it would be great to use other measurements beyond /dev levels and coding contributions.

Agreed! There are so many different and valuable ways to contribute to OpenMRS that go beyond coding. Some that immediately come to mind: making our community a welcoming place, documentation, QA, project management, UI/UX design, participating in our discussions, mentoring others, sharing resources/lessons learned, etc. I’m sure I’m leaving something out!

This also means that we’ll probably have to review the dev and omrs levels so we don’t leave any kind of contributions out of the application checklist.

@k.joseph

There are also people backing up implementations with tons of previous experience who may almost have no time staying active over the web but may have a lot to share during these implementer’s meetings

The current question on the scholarship application form is “How do you contribute to the OpenMRS project and/or implementations?” So I think these contributions can be to the OpenMRS community on the web and/or specific implementations.

@ball

We should aim for equity with scholarships. Recipients should represent gender and geographic diversity. (Maybe other areas to consider?) Not sure how this has been processed in the past, but the scoring process didn’t seem to clarify that.

How would you encourage gender and geographic diversity through the scoring process? Points based on gender and country? Or do we use scholarship award allocations - ie: no single country receives more than X awards, X awards go to women, etc? Some other way?

It sounds like a few things need to happen from here:

1. Look at the dev and omrs levels to see if they cover a variety of contributions - and decide how to address any gaps
2. Revise the current application and share it for feedback
3. Come up with some scoring guidance for the scholarship evaluation committee to use

It would be great to have a small group or two work these over the next few weeks. If we have a revised application form soon, we can give everyone a longer application period. Anyone interested?