Thanks @r0bby. I couldn’t agree more. I also think we need to be always pushing to maintain a model where leadership is an extension of the community – i.e., members of the community stepping up to lead efforts – and not something separate. I saw a good talk a while ago (can’t find the link now) where someone pointed out “leadership trying to communicate with the community” as an unhealthy metric, since there shouldn’t be such a distinction between leadership & community. Those who are volunteering their time to help lead efforts in OpenMRS have discussions in the Leadership Category, document notes on the wiki, and have calls weekly in Uberconference where recordings can be shared with anyone. These are by no means exclusive and, in fact, we’ve been actively seeking volunteers to take on leadership roles. OpenMRS, Inc. materials are on the wiki here.
There is a private leadership category for handling sensitive topic (i.e., those not suitable for publishing on the web), but we discourage it as well as email conversations. I would, like you, support an approach like: if you can’t give me a link to it (Talk topic, notes, wiki page, whatever), it wasn’t decided. I’d also love to find ways to make it easy to share our higher bandwidth or synchronous discussions like screencasts (e.g., leveraging Google On Air or Capturing screen shares on uberconference and getting them into YouTube).
There are other areas where we could benefit from being more transparent, including finding ways to publicize metrics on help desk traffic, development activity (like Darius’ pmtool), infrastructure needs, etc.
In the end, we all want the same thing: finding a way to most effectively use information technology and community to empower people in resource constrained environments to have better health.