Last week, the Technical Action Committee had a kickoff meeting. Most of the discussion focused on reviewing roles and responsibilities, discussing the differences between the Product Change Committee and the Technical Action Committee, and sharing initial ideas around what the TAC should focus on for the next couple of months.
Here are some of the points that came up during the meeting, some of which are similar to recent discussions that the PCC have had:
Important to have countries and implementations represented on the PCC so that the product responds to on the ground needs
Interested in having a roadmap that is grounded in what is feasible, what we know we can do now (i.e: in the next 3-6 months)
TAC can help identify what modules are used in the ecosystem that can be leveraged by others
TAC can determine the technical direction/approaches to invest in and what will help us get there (Microfrontends, being RESTful, moving away from server side, how OpenMRS can work at scale and how we get there, etc)
TAC could come up with its own set of priorities for the next few months that can be shared with the PCC to inform a roadmap.
During last week’s PCC meeting, questions came up about Sync 2.0, FHIR, and OCL for OpenMRS: where do these currently stand? What is next? These seemed to the PCC like questions that fall under the TAC’s purview.
The TAC did not set a weekly time to meet and instead decided to circulate a Doodle poll to help arrive at a time. I encourage everyone who is interested in participating in these discussions to take a Doodle poll. Special note: the time options displayed on the Doodle poll should be: 4pm EAT | 1pm UTC | 9am EDT | 6am PDT or 5pm EAT | 1pm UTC | 10am EDT | 7am PDT.
With Daylight Savings Time starting again in a couple of weeks, I’ll set one time for the coming two weeks and we can confirm how to handle the DST change at the next meeting.
Thanks @jennifer! Sorry I missed this the first time.
I replied to the poll and will get this on my calendar. My schedule is pretty crazy these days, so I’m not sure how many standing meetings I can fit in my calendar, but it sounds like I may way to prioritize this one over the FHIR squad.
The TAC provides our technical direction and strategy. We want make our technical vision explicit and get alignment on our technical challenges and priorities.
It’s important for the TAC and the PCC to have intentional opportunities to work together. We need to figure out when and where to make this happen.
The TAC should also make sure that the platform is maintained and up to date. We acknowledged that we face a chicken/egg dilemma: we want and need resources to get work done - and we need to know what work needs to be done in order to allocate resources to work that is actually needed by implementations.
Listing out what needs to be done is not going to help with alignment unless we know what our objectives are, what our technical direction and strategy is. Otherwise, we’re simply creating a list and people end up working on tickets or modules that are outdated while current work that would benefit many in the community languishes.
As a result, we spent 20 minutes brainstorming potential objectives. These need to be fleshed out.
Action Items
Put the rough objectives into a Google document
Turn the list of ideas into real objectives (@mogoodrich offered to help me with this, others are welcome to pitch in)
We also:
Confirmed our weekly meeting time since Daylight Saving Time starts this weekend. This is what the new times would look like: 7:30pm IST | 5pm Nairobi | 4pm Cape Town | 2pm UTC | 9am Boston | 6am Seattle
Figured out where and how we want to communicate on a daily/weekly basis: Dedicated Talk thread for now.
Recruiting technical leadership is more of a means to an end. Our objective is to make sure we actively build technical leadership to advance the platform and ecosystem
Recruitment is really an Operations thing - this committee (and the PCC) should inform Operations of their needs related to technical leadership to Operations
Another important objective focuses on recommended/endorsed technologies for the community
Added another objective that focuses on making OpenMRS implementation easier in different contexts - and the six different focus areas fall under this:
Improving configurability by end users
Easing deployment and upgrade paths
Increasing modularity and Improving development experience
Integration, interoperability and data sharing
Improve metadata management
Making sure the platform is stable (and stays stable)
Ideas for OMRS19
Hackathon focused on microfrontends + FHIR
Propose objectives/focus areas as unconference session
Friday session summarizes input
Use this as a leading session and then regroup
Action Items:
Add more feedback on the document
Take this and see if we can map this with the PCC needs - Mark has some thoughts about this
What objective/technical focus area will have the most impact/value for the community
Questions from the community and PCC about Sync 2.0, FHIR, and OCL for OpenMRS
Based on discussions in Maputo, we’re changing the TAC’s meeting time as we’ll be spending this month fleshing out the technical vision @burke talked about in Maputo.
According to December’s Doodle poll, Wednesdays are out and Fridays might be in - at 7:30pm IST | 5pm Nairobi | 4pm Cape Town | 2pm UTC | 9am Boston | 6am Seattle. That said, Doodle’s time zones have had a mind of their own recently, so please confirm your availability or take the poll if you haven’t already. @burke@mseaton@mksd@dkayiwa
Fridays are typically a good day for me to meet. I think we will need to update that Doodle Poll you linked to with some additional options if it is to be useful (at least it doesn’t show very many options to me any more).
Oh Doodle! I re-set the poll with times on Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, so please use the link below and not the previous ones. I didn’t change the dates since we’re trying to find a recurring day + time.
Thanks for all of the feedback, everyone! The earlier time on Friday won’t work for @burke and also conflicts with monthly Bahmni Governing Committee meetings.
Can we try
Fridays at 8:30pm IST | 6pm Nairobi | 5pm Cape Town | 3pm UTC | 10am EST | 7am PST?
Is this UTC-based – i.e., during daylight savings time from March to November it would be Fridays at 8:30pm IST | 6pm Nairobi | 5pm Cape Town | 3pm UTC | 11am EDT | 8am PDT?
During our Technical Action Committee (TAC) kickoff meetings, @mseaton asked the perfect question:
What are we doing?
This wasn’t just a the right question for the TAC group; it’s a great question for OpenMRS. With a growing community, expanding opportunities, constrained resources, an aging codebase, and a variety of incompatible frontends, it’s more important than ever for us to have a shared vision of what we are doing.
We started out by enumerating potential areas of focus for TAC:
Community tooling(SDK, migration to OpenMRS, or between OpenMRS versions, packaging artifacts, Docker images)
Strategic Decisions(EMR platform/middleware vs “full” EMR, harvesting from existing efforts)
Early goals for TAC will be to refine this list and prioritize some areas for which we can produce artifacts (Talk posts, blog posts, white papers, or project plans) that the community can use to align our efforts.
I agreed to send out this out to a few people who couldn’t make it, like @burke, @mogoodrich, and @jdick. I’ll also aim to send reminders every other day.
@mogoodrich raised some questions about oversight of what goes into the Ref App + Platform and how we maintain our technical products. The good news is that we’re in the process of filling the TPM position - and we recognize that there are still some resource gaps that we need to figure out how to address. We decided to tackle some of these questions on a future call.
