Proposing an OpenMRS "gardening" team

Community
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Listed below are the roles and responsibilities of the proposed OpenMRS Gardening team.

Responsibilities

The gardening team will address two main areas of interest:

  1. Software development & maintenance
  2. Artifacts & by-products (wiki, issue tracker, documentation, etc.) maintenance

The gardening team will:

  • Identify which modules, components, and features are most widely used based on to-be-determined criteria and help prioritize these
  • Identify bug fixes & issues identified by implementers, asses which are most critical, and coordinate their resolution via volunteer developers. Here, the team serves in the role of a champion for implementations that lack development resources, and customers that want to get the community’s help for any issues that they’re stuck with.
  • Help identify owners & maintainers for each module, and help transfer ownership of them as volunteers progress onto other tasks or areas of interest.

I was also asked to begin thinking about a metric that we could use to score open tickets based on the modules they applied to, the idea being that we could use these scores to show users what modules were more important, and help focus their attention on these.

To me, a suitable metric would include:

  • Number of module downloads per quarter

  • Number of new forks per quarter

  • Number of new issues/bugs reported per quarter

  • Number of pull requests per quarter

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@surangak, I would be interested in having a discussion with you about how I might contribute to the gardening team’s second area of interest (artifact & by-product maintenance), as I already do this is some capacity for Ampath Concept Team related topics.

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What do we think about getting GCI (Google Code in) students, who are in the age group of 13-17 in the gardening team? basically looking at ticket status, merging branches, looking at module compatibility or bug finding could be activities. Instead of writing code, more simpler work, but getting them interested and start contributing to open-source.

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Hi there,

Returning to this thread after a long hiatus. (Sorry, #mybad)

@michael can correct me if i’m wrong, but we’ve never applied to GCI before because we felt that our tech stack was a bit too complicated to teenage students, unless said students were named @elliott Williams :smile:

I guess there’s some merit in having them work on gardening, and it would be a nice and relevant pice of work. But of course, they will only be working on it for some time, and not all year around - which means that they’ll have to be let by a ‘core’ gardening team anyway…

@sarmson, i’m sorry, i missed your previous message. At this point, i’m simply trying to coordinate the effort, and get more qualified and experienced people (such as yourself) to take the lead. If you have any good ideas / suggestions on what direction we should take, please feel free to drop your suggestions here. :smile: