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As the OpenMRS community grows, it is important to offer opportunities for contributors & customers to connect with people in their part of the world. We also need a more coordinated effort to build local representation and expertise. One approach for achieving these goals is to develop local communities. The purpose of this document is to introduce the OpenMRS local community building effort and describe its merits.

Outcomes

  • Develop stronger relationships with community members

  • Encourage leadership in members of local communities

  • Build stronger local representation and identity

  • Attract new volunteers to local and global communities

  • Build and share local knowledge

  • Build stronger connections from local communities to the OpenMRS central leadership

Type of communities

We will support any type of community (dev / implementer / clinician / other?) provided that they can demonstrate collective desire for collaboration at a local level. A local community could be established in (but is not limited to) the following situations:

  • A group of geographically co-located individuals want to support the implementation of OpenMRS in their region. These individuals could be implementers, developers or clinicians. The type of individuals involved would determine the type of local community created.

  • A group of individuals (geographically co-located or not) what to support a specific set of feature or content development tasks. These individuals could be implementers, developers or clinicians. The type of individuals involved would determine the type of local community created. This type of community is similar to a special interest group (SIG).

  • Geographically co-located groups that are interested in non implementation specific tasks such as using, building and growing OpenMRS

Community establishment process

Local groups that already exist will be encouraged to apply for formal recognition. Following an evaluation process by the local community coordination leadership team, they will be approved and recognized as an official local community.

Approval Criteria

The baseline requirement for a local community is that they must be able to perform their responsibilities.

Community Naming

Each community should be able to choose their own community name in their local language. This should be a collaborative process between local community members.

Community Resources

Each community can choose the dedicated resources that they want, but these could include any or all of the following.

  • Mailing list

  • Dedicated wiki, wiki space or section (maybe at least one page?)

  • Dedicated JIRA or (set of) projects

  • IRC channel?

  • Dedicated GitHub org or (set of) repositories

  • Dedicated discourse instance or category

  • Team logo

Responsibilities

Each local OpenMRS community will be responsible for the following.

  • Scheduling regular in person or virtual meetings

The local community should meet reasonably regularly to discuss the issues that affect their communities. The meeting schedule and the minutes of these meetings should be made available to the broader OpenMRS community in the interest of knowledge sharing.

  • Self government and appointment of leadership

Each local OpenMRS community should have some guide of defined community goals and/or documented process. There should also be at least one team contact that will serve as an interface between the local community and global OpenMRS community.

  • Developing their own formal agenda and/or focus areas

Depending on the type of community (developer / implementer / clinician / etc), the objectives of the local communities may differ, but these objectives should nevertheless be definite and made publicly available.

  • Reporting to the global community (via ambassador)

The activities of local communities should be communicated back to the global community regularly (once per quarter) via the community ambassador.

Benefits

  • Formal recognition for events/efforts launched by the group

This could be in the form of announcement make on the various global OpenMRS communication channels (social media / lists / forums / IRC / blog) or by special mention during in-person meetings.

  • Community specific logos

Communities can request a group-specific logo that includes a custom variation of the OpenMRS logo as part of the local community identity.

  • Goodies for any public events

A small budget will be available for items such as stickers, lanyards or similar to be produced and made available for the community to distribute at official local events.

  • Official representation via an ambassador to a leadership team

Each local OpenMRS community will have

  • Technical expertise for OpenMRS-related efforts

  • Preferential scholarships awards for team members to represent the local community at a given group

  • Additional resources such as local community specific discourse and JIRA forums

Governance

The will be a subcommittee of the leadership team that will be responsible for the governance of local OpenMRS communities. The initial team members will be @michael, @surangak and @pascal. At first this team will be responsible for setting up the process and will eventually also responsible for maintaining the process as well considering application for new local communities.

Ambassador Roles

Ambassadors will engage with local communities (via team contacts) regularly help the communities be successful, grow and perform their responsibilities.

Once per quarter, each ambassador will provide a progress report back to the OpenMRS leadership group about the (one or more) communities they are responsible for.

Activity Ideas

The leadership team will set up and maintain a wiki page that outlines some ideas for local communities.

Guidelines

The leadership team will publish local community guides. These could include recommendations such as urging all local community members to create and OpenMRS ID, etc.

Documentation

It will be the task of the local community coordination leadership team to develop some documentation (most likely a wiki space / section) detailing all the tasks and processes discussed in this document.

Resources

The following might be useful for local community coordinations.

  • Ubuntu LoCo Portal. This is the portal for local Ubuntu communities and could provides some valuable resources and examples for developing and managing our community. See the great HOW-TO.

  • Python Local User Groups. The process for starting a Python user group is outlined on this page.

  • Blog post about organising a Mozilla community.

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