How to contribute to OpenMRS

In the past few days, our team has been searching for the best ways to start to contribute to OpenMRS.  They are using JIRA for issue management.  There is a list of the popular issues here.  I think we could potentially work on many of these.  As an example, here is one issue that caught my eye (open issue).  There is also a list of "unassigned" projects here.  I realized while looking through the OpenMRS website that they have a mentor system in place where each project is assigned a developer(s) and a mentor.  This kind of system could be very useful to people who are new to OpenMRS such as our team.  Apparently, one of our team members has already reached out to OpenMRS and we are now awaiting a reply.

Recently, I have been doing some research on the background and history of OpenMRS.  The founders include Paul Biondich, Burke Mamlin, Hamish Fraser , and Chris Seebregts.  Three of them met at a Medinfo conference and the fourth joined later on.  OpenMRS grew out of a need to scale up treatment of HIV in Africa.  Originally, hospitals would use paper systems, Excel spreadsheets, or poorly designed databases.  OpenMRS was introduced as a software platform which allows people with no programming knowledge to create customized medical record systems.  A core ideal of OpenMRS is that it be a general purpose medical record system that can support the full range of medical treatments.

If you would like to give OpenMRS a test run, check out the demo here.  Log in with username: admin and password: test