OpenMRS

Our group has made a decision.  We are going to be working with OpenMRS this semester and I am rather excited about it.  The scope of the project and the vision behind it makes contributing an exciting prospect.  My team members and myself are taking the first steps necessary to get involved in the project.  This includes joining the project's mailing list and accessing the project's  IRC.  I just joined the developers mailing list today and I have been amazed with all of the discussion that has transpired already.  For example, earlier during the day a contributor pointed out a date input problem with OpenMRS.  Apparently if you are using date format "dd/mm/yyyy" and enter in the date "01/23/2010", the system accepts the date but stores it as "01/11/2011". Additionally if you enter the date "01/01/09" it gets stored as "01/01/0009".  Throughout the day I've been following along, as a variety of contributors have discussed possible fixes to this bug.

I have never used IRC before but it seems easy enough to get the hang of.  You can access the OpenMRS chat room directly through their website but I also wanted to do it via a client.  I ended up installing a Firefox plug-in named Chatzilla.  The only tricky part about using the IRC client was figuring out how to navigate to the OpenMRS chat room.  Apparently ResNet (the wired campus network) blocks the necessary ports needed to connect with an IRC client.  But I successfully connected to the OpenMRS chat room once I switched to an external network.  Once I got down the common IRC commands, I scanned the IRC logs for interesting conversation.  I found a variety of communications from joke telling to the discussing of up coming meetings.  There is still more to be done to be fully ready to contribute to OpenMRS but I intend to reach that point in the coming days.

I recently read The Cathedral and the Bazaar and found it to be a very persuasive case for open source, bazaar style development.  It seems though that this bazaar  style of development is not suited for all projects.  The author even points out that a precondition to using this development strategy is to already have something to work with.  In other words, it is difficult to use the bazaar development style in creating a project from the ground up.  But where this strategy works, it seems to do so extraordinarily well and the reasons for its success are obvious.  These bazaar styled projects have an overflowing tap of resources.  Hundreds or even thousands of world wide contributors can help guide a project to success.  Contributors can hand pick projects that interest them to get involved with and these contributors are motivated (usually) by the desire to obtain reputation or by the need to "scratch an itch" to see progress in a project.  So, you end up with a plethora of contributors who are motivated to do what they do best - design,code,test,debug,and document.  Sounds like a pretty good strategy.