[Rubyforchange-talk] Coding for change

[Helder Ribeiro]

2007/8/17, evan <evan at protest.net>:
> I met a couple of their developers two years ago at a conference on
> open source in africa, (http://www.tacticaltech.org/africasource2) and
> have been following them since. At the time i told them they should
> rewrite their windows / VB system with rails, which they did and got
> really in to it on their own.
>
> I managed to get of their developers come out to San Francisco for a
> couple conferences in Feb and we hung out.
>
> I don't know what their license is for the software. If you want to
> get involved send them an email, or you could pop over to
> irc.freenode.net, they use the #baobab channel to coordinate things.

Wow, googled for OpenMRS after seeing it in the channel's topic and
got really impressed: they have a website geared towards developers
(and a clear "contribute" section with a big TODO list). It's the
first time I see that in a "social-outreach-software" (SOS?)
initiative. And the website's pretty :)

The topic says "OpenMRS and Ruby on Rails", which made it all the more
interesting. OpenMRS seems to be a sort of Java webapp though, so I
don't know what exactly they mean by that.

I don't know about you guys, but for me this sounds like the perfect
starting point:

- it has good developer information (well, at least OpenMRS);
- it relates to ruby/rails;
- it has a clear contribution channel;
- it is actually being used in production in Africa (which appeases my
big fear of putting a lot of effort into something no one will find
out about or use and will actually have zero social impact);
- it's not too well polished (there's a lot we can do).
- we skip the overhead of building something from scratch, making
requirements lists, etc., etc.

Of course this is just the first impression I got from a quick glance,
maybe I'm just hyped up, but what do you guys think? Worth at least
looking deeper into it?

Cheers,

Helder

>
> -rabble
>
> On 8/17/07, Helder Ribeiro <helder at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 2007/8/17, evan <evan at protest.net>:
> > > > As an example, I've heard about this big complex health management
> > > > software that is geared towards developing countries and is in active
> > > > use in Africa. That's the sort of thing I'd like to work on, or
> > > > something educational, etc., and something that is already in active
> > > > use if I can help it (it's less than ideal coming up with an idea and
> > > > maybe not having the means to actually get people to use it).
> > >
> > > I know of one project which is doing a rails app for use on touch
> > > screen computers in AIDS clinics in Africa. The project is lead from
> > > Malawi, but there are contributors from outside africa who contribute
> > > a lot.
> > >
> > > http://www.baobabhealth.org/
> >
> > Wow, this sounds awesome! I took a quick look at their website and it
> > all seemed very interesting, but I could find no information
> > concerning the specifics of the software they make, the license they
> > use and their policy regarding outside contributors. Maybe I just
> > didn't look hard enough. Do you know anything about this? I've sent
> > them an email asking, anyway.
> >
> > >
> > > They're great folks,
> > > rabble
> > >
> >
> >
> > --
> > http://obvio171.wordpress.com
> >
>


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