There has been some conversations around reviewing the current OpenMRS mission, values and vision. The current mission, values and vision are posted at http://openmrs.org/about/mission/
Please feel free to offer any changes that you think should be included. We look forward to your feedback; based on your feedback, we will propose changes to the current OpenMRS mission, values and vision.
To start the conversation, the following change was proposed:
The mission of OpenMRS is to improve health care delivery in resource-constrained environments by coordinating a global community that creates a robust, scalable, user-driven, open source medical record system platform and providing a mechanism to empower the organizations and individuals who implement it.
What about a slight change to make implementers part of the community:
The mission of OpenMRS is to improve health care delivery in resource-constrained environments by coordinating a global community of individuals and organizations that creates and implements a robust, scalable, user-driven, open source medical record system platform.
The mission of OpenMRS is to improve health care delivery in resource-constrained environments by coordinating a global community that creates a robust, scalable, user-driven, open source medical record system platform, builds applications on top of it, and deploys them worldwide.
I agree with Jan that the proposed rewording in the first post is not right, since it says we “empower the organizations and individuals who implement it” but doesn’t include them in the community. But it’s limiting to say our community just “creates and implements a … platform.” Our mission statement should be inclusive of the work done by distributions, module authors, etc, all of whom are part of our community.
Also, looking at the Values, below the Mission on http://openmrs.org/about/mission/, I think it is overly focused on development of the core platform, and we should modify it to be more inclusive of the work of implementers, as well as those who build and implement applications and distributions.
Specifically, under “Community-Driven”, be less developer-centric:
We believe in harnessing the wisdom of our software development community by creating a safe place to raise concerns, discuss failures, improve existing ideas, and solve problems.
I don’t have a specific suggestion for how to modify the two bullets under User-Centered and Open that talk about a platform and nothing else, but I think these values should be broadened.
