[Rubyforchange-talk] Coding for change

[Evan David Light]

I'm not sure that I scraped the surface much further but this project  
appears to have a bit of everything.  Looking at their Summe of Code  
page, they even had some data warehousing work proposed.   
ActiveWarehouse anyone?

Recommend further exploration.

I wonder that if we rallied enough troops behind this whether we could  
take the medical community at large by storm.  That would be a hell of  
a thing.

Evan Light
M: (703)615-0710
http://evan.tiggerpalace.com

Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 17, 2007, at 8:50 PM, "Helder Ribeiro" <helder at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>>>
>>
>
>
> -- 
> http://obvio171.wordpress.com
> _______________________________________________
> Rubyforchange-talk mailing list
> Rubyforchange-talk at rubyforge.org
> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/rubyforchange-talk