OpenMRS: Creating a pipeline of experts to transform digital health
When it comes to sustainability, one of the challenges faced by many open source digital solutions is the availability of sufficiently skilled developers to support and maintain the core product. At OpenMRS, the community discovered that greater adoption strained the availability of a small number of experienced developers, project managers, business analysts, and technical writers. This led to a situation where some recruits and newer contributors left the community because they lacked guidance on what to work on or needed mentorship to take on increasingly complex tasks. As a result, maintaining and sustaining community infrastructure, releases, and documentation continued to fall to the few senior developers available.
In response to this challenge, community members brainstormed several approaches for addressing this gap in the talent pipeline. In June, funding from Digital Square opened up an opportunity for OpenMRS to act on one approach: a fellowship program. This program is designed to provide individuals with the challenges they crave to grow or expand their skills, while also unblocking the OpenMRS talent pipeline of qualified and trained experts to enter and lead the community and the digital health field. As Jan Flowers of the University of Washington points out, this initiative reflects the OpenMRS community’s commitment to harnessing the community’s wisdom and sharing knowledge.
This initiative reflects the OpenMRS community’s commitment to harnessing the community’s wisdom and sharing knowledge.
- Jan Flowers, University of Washington
The Fellowship Program creates a mentorship cascade based a set of existing “OpenMRS Developer Stages. These stages describe the capabilities of developers from a basic ranks experience level (1) to from 1 to an expert level ( 5). Within the current cohort of OpenMRS fellows, the two mentors, recognized by the community as /dev/4 and /dev/3 developers respectively, each mentor 1-2 fellows at a lower level, either /dev/3 or /dev/2.
Participating fellows benefit from individual mentorship, an introduction to an array of technical frameworks, and the opportunity to hone new skills by contributing to a project with real world application. The current cohort is embedded with a community group building a standards-based solution for patient-level indicator reporting, a project currently funded by Digital Square. Through this project, they also engage with and learn from other experienced developers in the community. This sets fellows up as future experts with the ability to lead the next generation of OpenMRS developers.
OpenMRS already has a strong community of engineers who are accustomed to sharing openly and learning informally from other community members. The program aims to amplify the results of informal learning by giving mentors the opportunity to hone their mentorship skills as they convey their learned knowledge to fellows. Jennifer Antilla explains: “When you reflect on a good mentor that you might have had, you discover that there are real techniques and skills that they subtly use that can make your mentorship experience with them more powerful.” These include establishing a good rapport, assessing existing knowledge and skills, defining learning goals, nudging fellows to the right tasks and activities that will grow desired skills. Together, these lead to fellows meeting their own, technical learning goals.
By speaking with mentors about their experiences and goals as mentors, the OpenMRS Fellowship Program helps them become stronger mentors as they support fellows to define and reach their own learning goals. It covers how mentors want to grow professionally as well as the best pathway to get there.
It can be just as important to make that contribution through mentorship as it is to contribute to code.
- Jennifer Antilla, OpenMRS Community Manager
For years, people considered OpenMRS a community of geeks and engineers. Increasingly, OpenMRS sees the need for committed individuals with the diverse skill sets needed to develop a quality software application, from project and product management to business analysis, technical writing to quality assurance. The community hopes to expand both the fellowship program and the “stages” framework to encompass these other skill areas. Since these initiatives are based on common developer skill sets and instructional design principles, either can be adapted by other global good communities to introduce new professionals in to the digital health community and raise awareness among more experienced developers on techniques for effectively transferring their skills to those new to the community.
Through this fellowship, OpenMRS is acting on the idea that their work is not just about the product itself, but about building a digital health field and promoting an open source culture. As Jennifer Antilla says, “It can be just as important to make that contribution through mentorship as it is to contribute to code.” For now, the OpenMRS fellowship is building immediate skills to benefit products, but in the future it can transform the field of digital health.