Community Manager

Owned by Michael Downey
Last updated: Jul 25, 2016 by Burke Mamlin
2 min read

This page is a continual work in progress.

Contact Information

TBD
Email: 
Twitter:
IRC:
Office Hours: TBA

Description

The Community Manager is an individual responsible for ensuring successful collaboration and cooperation with the OpenMRS community. He or she does not "manage" people within the community, but does have responsibility for the processes and resources the community needs to produce software and services to fulfill the OpenMRS mission. This role requires dedication to the OpenMRS mission, values, and vision, as well as technical expertise and skills in conflict resolution, communication, and a deep understanding of the intricacies of cross-cultural cooperative work in a distributed environment.

Responsibilities

  • Community advocacy

    • Bridge gaps between OpenMRS "customers" (e.g., users, implementers) and contributors

    • Nurturing and growing skills and diversity of contributors

    • Communication of strategy and planning efforts within the community

  • Community promotion

    • Promotion of vision & mission, events, products and upgrades to current and potential community members.

    • Ensure representation of OpenMRS at key industry and open source events

    • Participation in outreach programs such as Google Summer of Code

  • Communication and responding to needs

    • Understand OpenMRS community participants (measure and report growth, interests, needs, fit)

    • Organization of community events and meetings (e.g., hackathons for focused software development efforts and contributor networking, conferences, project leadership summits, periodic community updates)

    • Mediation of disputes within the community should they arise

  • Feedback loop for software development

    • Building and maintaining appropriate community governance and balancing against bureaucracy

    • Manage collaborative processes used by community and maintain tools to support them (some aspects may report to engineering)

    • Represent the voice of the OpenMRS customer by listening to and understanding feedback within and outside the OpenMRS community. Assemble requirements & needs and facilitate interpretation with engineering teams.

Resource Requirements

  • 1 FTE general community management

  • 1 FTE technology infrastructure operations ("dotted line" report to engineering)

  • 0.5 FTE (annual) special event coordination at 100% utilization for 5-6 months per year

Not Responsible for...

  • Directing or managing daily work of individual contributors

  • Defining software road map items or scheduling engineering work priorities

  • System implementation research, monitoring, or evaluation

References