Infrastructure Volunteers

Owned by Jennifer Antilla
Last updated: Feb 03, 2023
2 min read

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 on OpenMRS' Slack workspace, 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.