Collaboration with OpenMRS

While we are working on finalizing our relationship with a fiscal sponsor, I think we should also think about ways in which we can collaborate with other open-source projects. We have currently listed in our governance document about projects, sub-projects, teams etc., but not so much about projects that may want to collaborate, but still have their own community. This OpenMRS thread seems to ask us that question. May be we add a bit about such orgs in our governance?

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Once we have our public launch, we’ll also publish a more user-friendly page on the project proposal & incubation processes, as are described in the current drafts and discussion around the governance plan.

If maintainers from OpenMRS projects are interested in proposing one or more of their efforts as an incubator project (perhaps on a “fast-track” since they are ostensibly already established and will already follow many of the community standard practices), I don’t see any reason to prevent that from happening!

This sounds highly ambiguous without a more concrete proposal. If someone wants to grow a health-related FOSS project and leverage our people, skills, infrastructure, the most obvious path forward should be joining as part of the community through the project process. If they want to participate as an upstream or downstream project, then the correct approach is to fork or otherwise work with one of our code repositories and contribute back up/down stream any meaningful changes. Is there a different type of collaboration I’m not thinking of?

Anyway, much better if we can have a real-life dialogue about practical things, which will hopefully happen here. :slight_smile:

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Reposting the original comment here and thank you to Saptarshi for posting the link to the original post.

i am posting here to help start a dialogue about LibreHealth (mentioned in the interview with @judy https://opensource.com/health/16/8/linuxcon-interview-judy-gichoya-openmrs6.

and OpenMRS-- how we work together, keep each other informed on what is happening, share and be transparent, and figure out our organizational and community relationships! Thanks in advance for your thoughts and insights!

Since the conversation is being directed to this forum, hopefully others will follow here as well. I am not sure why it was necessary to mute the other forum as that is where most of the OpenMRS users at least would be contributing most easily.

In any case, it seems a good thing to open channels of dialog with the former community so that we can best understand how we feel that we can best work together to support the overall community of users and global health to which both communities are committed. I believe that we have learned a lot in our decade of work at OpenMRS as well as the very important time that we had Michael leading our community. I would think that we should be able to share those lessons with the LibreHealth community as well as consider how to best be synergistic. I am sure that the large number of OpenMRS users and health systems which depend on OpenMRS and its community would be reassured to know that.

I hope this forum would provide at least a start to that discussion.

Best of luck in the new endeavor! Andy Metadata and Terminology lead for OpenMRS

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I don’t follow posts on OpenMRS talk anymore, as much as this forum… it is likely similar for many others who have moved on from OpenMRS to LibreHealth or were never part of OpenMRS, but are working on LibreHealth projects. That is why it seems logical to me that we discuss the collaboration here.

We indeed plan to be backward compatible with OpenMRS, with the idea of making LTS releases. Similar to how many other open-source communities like Ubuntu-Debian, Mint-Ubuntu, Cinnamon-GNOME etc work. It depends on whether OpenMRS chooses to backport/or take contributions we make to our repos back? I clearly don’t see why anyone should see this as a hostile fork :slight_smile: . The librehealth-toolkit is the OpenMRS link, but beyond that we have other projects in the pipeline.

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Muting meant I would get no notifications – not that others can’t respond. In other words, I lost interest in the discussion because it was just a giant echo chamber. The problem was that I was the only one – and if that thread continued – even I would have been gone.

I have to say I never saw why people were threatened by the fork…those who are threatened are the ones who don’t have a firm understanding of how Open Source works…