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The OpenMRS Community Management Team helps to build and support the OpenMRS community. This has two meanings – both operating the technology infrastructure that serves the OpenMRS community, as well helping to coordinate the people who are the "infrastructure" for OpenMRS itself.

Community Management

Jennifer Antilla , Director of Community

Not everyone who volunteers in the OpenMRS community needs to be a programmer or technical genius! Here are some ideas:

  • Talk with new people in the OpenMRS community to find out their interests and help them find the best ways to participate.
  • Help organize or moderate a community meeting or event
  • Help run our mentorship programs, like Google Summer of Code or our Fellowship Program
  • Recognize outstanding community contributors and organizations
  • Respond to e-mail inquiries from the OpenMRS.org web site and help those people find the information they need. These may include requests for information about the project or technical support requests.
  • Help improve our community documentation on this wiki. Volunteer to write notes for meetings, or help clean up errors or formatting problems on existing wiki pages.
  • Update the OpenMRS Twitter account and Facebook page with news and other information of interest to our community. If you need access, just request it in a new ticket.
  • Write a blog post on OpenMRS.org about current projects or profiling people in our community. Open a request for a WordPress account to get started.

Infrastructure volunteers

If you are interested in volunteering for the project doing more technical work other than coding, there's plenty to be done. The IT Services Provided needs a lot of care and feeding. There are lots of ways you can get started as an infrastructure volunteer. (The following list needs updated!)

  • Sign in to and read OpenMRS Talk and be aware of what is going on. Spend as much time as you can in #openmrs on IRC too.
  • Work on infrastructure-related documentation on the wiki, especially how-to documentation, troubleshooting, and answers to FAQs. We want to be able to help people search for their own answers!
  • Look around at issues in all JIRA projects to make sure workflows are being followed correctly and tickets aren't in conflicting states (e.g., resolved without assignee).
  • Answer infrastructure-type questions that other people ask on OpenMRS Talk. 
  • Volunteer for on-call support through our Helpdesk.
  • Create new help desk cases for infrastructure-related issues that aren't yet entered. We don't want to lose them!
  • Watch for support requests that may arrive as questions on mailing lists or as new JIRA issues, and volunteer to claim & resolve them.
  • Volunteer to be on-call to resolve system outages other high-severity infrastructure issues.

The infrastructure team is small and a bit unlike the rest of the community - reliability and stability of technical resources take priority over agility, although that's important to us, too. Decisions must often be made very quickly, especially during urgent situations such as system outages. Therefore, we try to follow some of the goals established by the Apache Software Foundation's infrastructure team:

Sometimes we vote, sometimes people just do things because they know they make sense. Amazingly big far-reaching decisions are sometimes made after a 3-minute conversation on IRC.

Some people are sufficiently familiar with the configuration of particular machines, and the operation of the Infrastructure team, to have the authority to "lay down the law". More people may have sufficient privileges to change stuff, but will only do so after extensive consultation. The best way to learn how we make decisions is to hang around and see.

A sound, technical argument will always be heard out, even if it's not ultimately accepted. Rules and points of order will generally be disregarded. This is the only way Infra can stay productive.


Read more about about the technical IT Services Provided.Image Added


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Info
titleGetting Infrastructure Support

Do you need support with the OpenMRS.org infrastructure? First, make sure that your issue is something that we can help you with.

What we support:

  • Issues connecting to or using the OpenMRS.org web site and OpenMRS community collaboration tools (JIRA issue tracker, Confluence wiki, Bamboo, etc.)
  • Problems with your OpenMRS ID account
  • Mailing list problems, issues, or questions
  • Social media services (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, other services)

What we don't support:

  • End-user support for using or customizing the OpenMRS platform and software
  • Development & design questions

If we can help, please get in touch with us:

  • Create a new case at https://help.openmrs.org/ signing in with your OpenMRS ID for fastest service.
  • If you the above isn't working, please email helpdesk (at) openmrs (dot) org.
  • Please describe your problem in as much detail as you can so we can assist.



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