What is the OpenMRS Plan for Core Development

[mogoodrich (Mark Goodrich)]

Steven,

I had been meaning to respond to this but hadn’t gotten a chance, but I joined the TAC call today, and it reminded me that I needed to.

@ssmusoke

I have been part of the community for the last 4 years, and there has been no “core technical development” efforts happening in OpenMRS, to move the platform and RefApp forward at least for the last 18 months

This has been due to an exodus of “core devs” paid & focusing to work on moving the platform forward, and currently these efforts have been left to implementations to fund and try out on their own.

I think this is key… for a long time, we generally had about 3 developers funded to work on OpenMRS, but for at least the past year it’s been down to 1.

On the Technical Action Committee call today (and as a side note I want to thank @jennifer for pulling this and the Product Change Committee together) I talked a little about a chicken-and-egg problem: a roadmap/plan is critical to guiding those who want to contribute, and also as a vision for fundraising, but with progress being so slow over the past few years we feel less motivated to take part in these committees (ie “is this really going to lead anywhere?”).

IMO, it’s key to have a core, dedicated technical team to work on the product. And I think you’d have stronger participation on committees if there was a belief that there was a team dedicated to actioning proposals from the committees.

That being said, it’s worth noting that “OpenMRS” has never hired core devs. We are OpenMRS, and we were fortunate to have developers from a particular organization that were pretty much tasked to work on OpenMRS full-time (or at least that is my understanding, I’m not sure of the details).

An argument could be made that the organizations who benefit most from OpenMRS should pick up the slack and provide resources that could be seconded full-time to OpenMRS. But, realistically, this hasn’t happened over the years (beyond the aforementioned developers) and I don’t see that changing in the future. (For my organization in particular, we have a dev working part-time on the microfrontends project, but I don’t see us having the bandwidth to commit more than that currently).

Understanding this, we’ve lobbied hard in the past that “OpenMRS” should recruit and hire a (small) core development team. If nothing else, I would love OpenMRS to have a strong technical architect who could spend their time forced solely on OpenMRS big picture issues without the distractions of day-to-day implementation challenges that seem to drain our time so often.

But this has never happened, and I think there are a few reasons for this:

1. The issue with non-profits being unable to take part in software development without losing their non-profit status
2. Lack of funds
3. No one taking the lead on recruiting and hiring
4. Pushing back on hiring developers because of the believe that OpenMRS should stay “lean”

I would definitely be interested in talking further about how we could overcome some of these hurdles… (I haven’t been on many calls of late, so apologies if there are developments in these areas that I’m not aware of).

Also, for anybody who hasn’t read it, I suggest this thread which basically discusses these same issues:

Community Roles and Decision Making

At OpenMRS, we embrace and celebrate the work that small teams or groups do in our community because it’s become a proven way for us to solve problems together. Over the next few months, we’re very likely to get to a point where some of the innovative work currently being done by a small group or team will be ready to move to the next stage. Given the wider implications for the community and the teams’ work, we’ll have some decisions to make about how the community proceeds. This is already st…

Take care, Mark