Thank you so much for helping us select the dates for the mini-community meeting. The tentative date for the meeting with the most votes is August 31st, September 1st and 2nd. Please consider submitting your vote here, if you haven’t until now.
As some of you may already know, we are merging this mini-community meeting with the Virtual Design Conference, many thanks to Digital Square funding. Through this conference, we aim to promote the use of our design documentation and activities.
Currently, we are working on brainstorming the theme and objectives of the conference. Please help share your thought and ideas for the potential theme and objectives for this year’s Virtual Design Conference.
Ciaran and Paul have been working closely with their colleague Aline, who Ampath/@jdick have helped bring on to improve our O3 Design Patterns Documentation/Onboarding materials. This workshop would be a great way to:
Onboard folks to the O3 Design Pattern guidelines
Receive practical user feedback on this
Have activities where folks can practice applying these.
The Virtual Design Conference sounds like a great idea!
Might I suggest we begin by identifying a theme, then build a range of activities for an agenda from there?
I think it would be great to mix presentations (such as the O3 documentation) with more participatory sessions… maybe a design thinking workshop around a particular challenge our community would like to solve?
The virtual design conference sounds great. I second @pauladams’s suggestion of having a participatory session around a particular topic or challenge that’s relevant to community members and implementers. Perhaps there could be a workshop to create a vision for a particular feature that would have widespread appeal / utility in the community.
It’s important to say though that for these kinds of sessions to work well, they require a bit of time to plan, and they will need to be properly prepared and facilitated by a designer. In order for anything that’s produced or discussed during the conference workshop to be actionable, dedicated time would be needed for a designer to synthesise the output of the workshop into something that could then be shared back with the community to drive interest / continue momentum. Otherwise, these kinds of discussions can result in ‘a lot of talk’ and not much else
About the design documentation, this work has really only just begun. By the end of August we will only have documented:
Nav bar
Patient header
Drug item (possibly)
There are still many more ‘objects’ inside of OpenMRS that we intend to document as part of this work, so we won’t really be ready to publish or onboard folks to the documentation by the time of the virtual conference, as we will still be working on getting basic elements documented. However, we can certainly introduce the docs to the community, give a first look at what we have so far, and gather initial impressions from people at the conference to see that we’re hitting the right mark, and factor any feedback we get into its on-going development.
Thank you so much for the wonderful feedback. As mentioned by @pauladams, I very much like the idea of having the participatory sessions along with lightning talks and showcases, rather than having ‘a lot of talk’ session rightly highlighted by @cduffy.
Let’s keep this discussion of the theme and objectives alive, I have been curating the ideas as they come. @jennifer please do share if you have any additional ideas regarding the theme.
Meanwhile, based on the suggestion shared by everyone, I have drafted the basic flow of the schedule, please find it here.
(The current idea behind the schedule: Day 1 is focused on introduction with keynote, panel, and showcase so that participants can learn more about what going on in the design space and set a base for the second day. Day 2 is focused on lightning talks and workshops so that participants can have hands-on experiences on some particular design aspects. Day 3 is focused on panels and workshops, where participants can learn and prepare for the next phases)
Please do check it out and drop a comment if there is any. Also, feel free to share suitable topics and speakers/moderators for that topics.
I love the idea of having some participatory sessions where people can try different & new things out!
I also think this is a great opportunity to continue “making the case” for not only being more design driven, but for sharing designs openly with others in the community. To this end, it might be interesting to have a panel with people who are starting to see the advantages of using our design conventions, process, and output.
In terms of some broad themes/objectives, I’m reminded that one of our community’s values is being user-centered: “Design decisions are driven by real, not perceived needs. Our software works in the most challenging health care delivery environments. We create a platform that is adaptable to the unique needs of our users around the world.” This also aligns with the Principles of Digital Development: Design with the User.
Seems to me like this conference is showing how we, as a community, are now “walking the talk.”
A big shout out to @grace and @pauladams for joining the global events meeting last week and helping us shape the conference objective and schedule.
Here are some recent updates regarding the conference.
We are calling it the “2022 UX Design Conference” and the date has been finalized. Please find more details about the date here. It’s happening on 31 Aug to 2 Sep 2022
The conference wiki is up with the latest update. Please do check out the details, proceed with the registration, and if you are interested in presenting, do apply for the slot.
