I wanted to write a brief note on behalf of the entire OpenMRS community to recognize the exceptionally important work of Michael Downey within our project.
Over the past 6-7 years, Michael worked tirelessly alongside the rest of us to create a welcoming, supportive community. He lived, breathed, (and often slept!) OpenMRS… and was a fantastic student of open source communities in general. One of the things I personally appreciated about Michael was his wisdom about how our community should evolve, and what we could do to empower individual members of the community to get things done and to lead others. Many of us learned a lot from our conversations with him. A lot of how we’re actively working to evolve the project will forever have Michael’s imprint within it. He has a lot to be proud of on that front.
It goes without saying that Michael has left some big shoes to fill. While transitions are often sad times, the project can and will move on with vigor. If I were to categorize the primary things that Michael helped lead/oversee, I’d place them into four buckets:
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OpenMRS IT Infrastructure Oversight
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OpenMRS Communication Infrastructure Architecture / Customization
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Event Planning
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Community Engagement
As you can see, that is a large collection of activities. So much in fact, that many of us believe that it’s too much for a single individual to manage. That said, our transition plans are based upon the presumption that these various buckets of responsibility will ultimately be overseen by more than one individual, and the day to day responsibilities will become more and more a “team sport”, as Michael would have architected himself.
The community leadership is working with Michael and his pre-existing teams to transition his responsibilities to identified community members, and perhaps some new future members to the community. I expect that we will be able to give you all more specific detail about this in the next 2 weeks, so stay tuned to this thread for more information. I’ve asked @burke to help lead this transition process.
Michael intends to still be involved with the community in some activities, in particular the Google Summer of Code. If you see him around, please do let him know how appreciative you are of the many sacrifices and late nights he spent with the project.
I speak on behalf of the leadership team when I say THANK YOU MICHAEL for all that you did for us as the OpenMRS Director of Community.
Also, feel free to ask questions here about the transition, if you have any.