Notes from South Africa

I'm currently in South Africa at the HISA 2008 Conference, where I'm helping to facilitate the OpenMRS Developers Track. I'll also be giving a keynote on Friday morning on Creating Sustainable Collaborative Communities: Lessons Learned from Google Summer of Code™. I'm incredibly excited to be here for many reasons: first solo keynote, first OpenMRS Developers Meeting I've attended, first time in Africa, and my first time getting to deeply engage with the Open Source community working in the bioinformatics and health care space. I'm also thrilled because the talk I'm giving will be the first time I'll be exploring some of the collective wisdom I've gleaned from working with over 175 projects with a wider audience; it feels like a great way to give back to the community, particularly since this community is focused on providing adequate patient care for those with HIV in the developing world.

This afternoon the Dev Track is purely open space, so I've had a few minutes to catch up on email and to update the old blog. July is usually the busiest month for the Open Source Team and preparing for this conference, OSCON, and the GHOP Awards Ceremony, all while onboarding a new hire for my team has kept me quite busy. There's the usual care and feeding of Summer of Code, too, but we have a great bunch of students this year, as usual, and things have been pretty smooth if hectic. It's how we roll....

I've been in town since Monday afternoon and it's been quite the experience thus far. I'd like to thank Chris Seebregts and Carl Fourie from the Program Committee for inviting me to present here, as well as the OpenMRS team for the honor of helping them come together and get things done. It's only day two of the conference, and things are really popping. With an endless supply of coffee and snacks and so many passionate people working together on common problems, the buzz in here is just incredible. There are still at least 50 people in here even though the main conference sessions closed down an hour ago, all of them hacking away, whiteboard prototyping, sharing ideas and excitement. The projects here - OpenMRS, Partners in Health, OASIS (no, not the standards body; they're looking for a new name :), Mirth, Baobab, inSTEDD - have decided to use this time to work on project interoperabilty challenges, and the few Google stickers I brought with me have made great prizes for some of our ice breaker sessions. The OpenMRS guys are running a parallel bug squash for their 1.3 Release Candidate. We've even got a documentary filmmaker here observing the track and interviewing individual developers and teams about their processes. The Dev Track room is definitely the place to be.

So that's up to the minute HISA 2008. Here are some general thoughts on my time thus far in South Africa.

The good

Well, all of the above really. It's always nice to see Paul, Shaun, Ben, Brian, Darius and Justin. The thing that really sticks out in my mind so far, though, is how little ego seems to be a driver in this particular set of Open Source communities. I'd immediately noticed that aspect about the OpenMRS folks their approach resonates throughout this room. There's little if any acknowledgement of rank and nary a sniff of my code is bigger than your code. Very enjoyable, collegiate vibe. Also, and it might be just that it's an informatics conference rather than the usual Open Source conference, but there are many women here, several of them coders. Very refreshing.

I've had the chance to sit down with a lot of folks and help them brainstorm about their ideas. Shared a coffee with Dykki Settle of the Capacity Project and kicked around ideas for how to build developer communities in Africa by targeting students. The work their group is doing to create software that allows Health Ministries better manage their health care worker deployments is an interesting parallel to the work done by all the health care hackers I usually hang out with, who are focused on deploying patient care systems at the clinic level. The Capacity Project has already released all their code as Open Source; they're already on their 3.0 release. I've also spent some quality time with James Arbaugh of the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Haiti, learning more about their OpenMRS installation. James is a bug filing machine. Tomorrow he'll speak, along with OpenMRS implementers from Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda. There are folks here from places like the WHO and the Rockefeller Foundation - definitely not your typical Open Source conference - and they're also totally down to earth, hanging out and having beers.

The bad

Either United or South African Airways lost one of my bags, which was of course the bag that had 99% of my clothing. The gift of an OpenMRS shirt has helped ease the pain, but if my suitcase doesn't turn up tomorrow I'm going to have to break down and go buy some clothes. It's been rainy and rather dreary for the past two days, too. I'm taking comfort in the fact that I don't need to miss my swimsuit since there's no chance to visit the beach in this weather, even though it's less than 1 km away. I have an awesome view of it from my hotel room window, and I've fallen asleep to sound of the Indian Ocean and the rain every night. So it's hardly that bad.

Speaking of rain and the suboptimal, every time I travel I'm reminded of how sheltered Americans are regarding the rest of the world. I turned on the TV shortly after arrival and was greeted by in-depth coverage of the current flooding in Iowa, though I'm quite confident that I've never seen such a mention on CNN about South Africa being the 30th driest country in the world. Fortunately, the government provided a handy sign that I spied on my way from Durban International Airport, so I can certainly count this trip as educational. I've been reading a book on brand marketing recently and the authors remarked on the changes brought to the American life by increased travel, particularly to Europe. I hope that this trend continues and my country becomes more self-aware, world-aware and cosmopolitan.

The amazing

I've heard a lot from the OpenMRS folks about their installation in Eldoret, Kenya, but I just learned from Ben that they've recently seen a 100% success rate in their efforts to prevent HIV transmission from mother to child during pregnancy. That's right, provided a mother does not subsequently breast feed her infant, there is a 100% chance her baby will be born HIV negative. These folks don't rest on their laurels, though; Paul is quick to point out that mission #2 is to make sure these children don't become orphans.

Wow. I am so happy that I can spend a week with these folks helping them achieve these goals together. I've seen a lot of talk about analyzing Summer of Code as a model for incentivizing student developers and several folks have posed the question if students can be motivated by social justice and social welfare causes instead of cash. I certainly can't see why not; I'm absolutely awed by the passion of every person in this room for what they do. That being said, human beings have been analyzing what the essence of love and passion is and how they are created between two human beings for as long at least as long as we have written records, and I think we're no closer to finding the answer about what makes a person passionate about a cause than we are to understanding how we come together with our life partners. Passion, it would seem, must be inspired, but certainly it has to find fertile ground or the most inspiring cause won't motivate and the greatest of rhetoric will fail to sway.

We've got a full slate the rest of the week and I head back on Saturday. If I have enough time I'll be posting updates from the Dev Track and the feedback I receive on my talk.

Now if only I'd thought about building enough time into this trip to go on safari and finally get the chance to see a giraffe up close and personal. That's definitely on the list for my next visit to New Zealand. Sure it's a zoo, but you actually get to feed the giraffes. Awesome.