What's the best time of year for Implementers Meetings?

Historically, we’ve help the OpenMRS Implementers Meetings in September. OMRS11-14 moved into October. Because of some logistical issues, OMRS16 and OMRS17 ended up in early December. We’d like to strive for consistency/predictability to increase the likelihood of people being able to anticipate and join these annual community meetings. One downside of December, is energy from the meeting can be lost to the following holiday season.

As we gear up to start asking for countries/organizations to host OMRS18, we’d like to revisit the timing of the conference. Some of the issues we’ve dealt with historically:

  • We’d like to minimize conflicts with informatics meetings (e.g., MedInfo in end of August, AMIA in early November)
  • We’d like to minimize conflicts with major holidays

For anyone in the community who might be planning or aspiring to go to future OpenMRS Implementers Meetings, we’d love to hear you preference. This little poll won’t determine the timing of future meetings, but it will certainly factor into planning for future meetings.

When would you like us to have OpenMRS Implementer Meetings each year?

  • I preferred September
  • I preferred October
  • Keep in early December
  • Move to a new month (I’ll give my reasons in a comment)

0 voters

@burke its a good observastion

Avoiding major holidays probably excludes October in Nepal (and possibly India). The major holiday time in Nepal is (3 to 4 weeks) from the Dashain to Tihar festivals. These have a variable dates, but are usually late September/early October to late October/early November.

If it stays in December could it please be earlier.

Note that there is probably no month where there is no single country that has a major holiday in it, so we might have to go with the month with the least holidays across the globe. So far it seem like September and October that are good candidates.

All this is best for us:

  • Mid October to mid December
  • February to April