Date

17 December 2009

In Attendance

Darius is working on getting resources aligned for his transition. Hamish has already over-committed Darius, and Paul is eager for that to happen.
There was discussion about a possible training session with new resources in Indianapolis given the new OpenMRS and Regenstrief developers that need to get up to speed on the platform. Darius may be able to join Ben for such an event in February, after several people return from Kenya. Ideally, this meeting could serve as an exercise to develop documentation for new developers.

Darius and Ben spoke about the code review on Tuesday, and both agreed it went well.
Darius will be traveling through the holidays so the 1.6 alpha release is slated for the second week of January.
Burke and Paul are hoping to load 1.6 alpha on new servers at Regenstrief to take to Kenya in mid-January. They could then swap out the 1.6 final release when it's available, as long as that date is before they leave at the end of January.
Current testing does not address the logic module changes in 1.6. This needs to be addressed. CHICA should be brought into the testing since they are major users of logic.
Darius has a working list of trivial bugs for 1.6, which was sent out to the list in a recent e-mail. Some of these are done or are actively being worked, and some can likely be pushed back to 1.7. Ben & Justin will try to handle some of these trivial tickets early next week.
There shouldn't be a problem with the target date for the alpha release.

Ben says that Chase is doing it again this year.
Last year was a worthwhile trip, although nobody turned into regular volunteers. However, their contributions were valuable enough that Ben thinks a core developer should attend again this year.
Ben's and Darius' schedule prevents them from attending. No one else volunteered at this point.
If it's not feasible for someone to be there in person, one possibility is to commit to 24-hour presence on IRC and/or other channels.
There are some people at WebReach Mirth contributing to OpenMRS, they may be willing and interested in participating.
Some thought was given about how to get long-term commitment out of students at Stanford. A better plan for this up front could help the chances.

Burke spoke briefly about the roadmap for 1.7. He suggests picking a couple of them for major themes to further drive design goals for the release.
Paul asked some rhetorical questions about the feasibility for a pure performance-related release, and how we should address implementing UI changes (incremental vs. major changes). Paul suggests these strategy discussions happen in the next meeting.
Ben suggested regularly-scheduled monthly roadmap/strategy update meetings (on the agenda of the first developer call each month).
The project's organization has overall need to evolve to better handle release management. (Growing pains.)
Paul suggested an annual retreat to focus on organization, roadmap, and other "activity" modules. The core development group agreed to a 2-day retreat to address these issues in early January or early February.

Mike McCoy joined the group at the end of the meeting. He is working to integrate OpenMRS in his work at Regenstrief, particularly order entry functionality. Paul rattled off a long list of other organizations that are also interested in collaborations. These all point to the need to strengthen developer training resources and overall structure/transparency of the roadmap and organization. (See above.)