cmswest wrote on Friday, April 01, 2016:
the personnel committee, Robert Down and I, nominate Brady Miller for the position of executive director to be voted on at the April 13 meeting.
fsgl wrote on Friday, April 01, 2016:
Thanks, Stephen.
Will remind everyone involved that this & other matters are on the agenda both via email & the Meeting Bulletin Board thread.
Folks are busy, so forgetting is easy. With Brady’s reminder & 2 more, we hope that we will have a quorum.
tmccormi wrote on Friday, April 01, 2016:
I will be unable to attend the 4/13 Board Meeting. I’ll be in Ireland and it will be 2am…
Will need the Secretary to run the meeting… Art? Please confirm
–Tony
President/Chairman
fsgl wrote on Saturday, April 02, 2016:
Tony,
If you are in favor of Brady’s candidacy & because you will be abroad during the next meeting; it will be good to have Stephen act as your proxy in this vote.
There are a number of items that require a full complement of officers so that OEMR can move forward.
tmccormi wrote on Saturday, April 02, 2016:
The important person to hear for on that nomination is Brady.
Brady, Are you accepting ths nomination? I assume that Stephen and Robert chatted with you about this? I’d like to see your thoughts posted about it.
Dr Bowen was the previous director and he had very strong opinions about how the OEMR should be managed that resulted in the near break up of the community due to differences of opinion and he resigned and completely dropped out of the public discussion. I would not want that to happen again.
Tony
President of the Board
bradymiller wrote on Saturday, April 02, 2016:
Hi,
I accept the nomination and was already aware of it before the above post. My main goal, for now, is to work with the board of directors and community to get the OEMR organization on solid ground.
-brady
fsgl wrote on Sunday, April 03, 2016:
Now that concerns have been allayed, is a proxy to elect Brady possible?
cmswest wrote on Sunday, April 03, 2016:
No, but we may take action without a meeting if we do not have a quorum April 13th.
cmswest wrote on Sunday, April 03, 2016:
hi fsgl, i was referring to article vi section 10 of the bylaws
fsgl wrote on Sunday, April 03, 2016:
Mr. Treasurer,
I now understand why the study of constitutional law can be a life-long pursuit.
The Bylaws are only 14 pages, but chock-full of stuff!
Article VI, Section 10 requires written consent from all 11 of the directors.
Might be easier to get enough folks to form a quorum than to get written consent from everyone.
It’s still nice to know about this provision, thanks.
yehster wrote on Thursday, April 07, 2016:
Brady,
I’d like to hear details about how you intend to “get the OEMR organization on solid ground.”
There are obivous needs such as more funding for projects.
Better coordination of resources/development effort seems like an important issue too. (For example Instead of three or more teams all separately trying to bring bootstrap into the project a single unified effort might have been possible).
Community outreach/participation end-users also seems like an area for improvement. Of the hundreds of weekly downloads, we rarely see new users participate. They only ever seem to come when they haven’t fully read the setup guides and have things like notices and strict tables misconfigured. More warnings/checks could be added to the installer, but then we’d see even fewer end-users come to the forum. The number of weekly downloads is impressive, but most of them don’t add real value to the project.
Do you have a plan to address some of these issues or any others that you feel deserve more priority if elected to the Executive Director position?
tmccormi wrote on Thursday, April 07, 2016:
As the president of the board I’ve been trying to achieve many of those things and have the same concerns. Help is needed and the role of Exec is really meant to be a day-to-day operations manager.
I am more than happy to continue to work on outreach, but the community, in general has not been very receptive to that (conference attendence, adverstising, etc …) budget is an issue, as always.
Herding the cats to coordinate on common project goals is very hard…
–Tony
bradymiller wrote on Friday, April 08, 2016:
Hi Kevin,
What I primarily mean by “get the OEMR organization on solid ground” are much more simple and necessary to allow OEMR to fly in the future:
- Tax status clear and transparent
- Accounting clear and transparent
- Obtaining quorum at all monthly meetings
- Having records (ie. minutes) of all monthly meetings
- Online place where all above information is accessible to OEMR and public
- MU2 certification
Without fulfilling the basics above, then it will be near impossible for the OEMR organization to obtain significant funding in the future.
Regarding your specific issues. I think the scope of these critical issues expand beyond the OEMR organization and involve the entire OpenEMR community; and a book could probably be written about them. Just a couple points:
- Over the last 6-9 months or so, OpenEMR has definitely reached a new phase whereby larger entities are now participating in primary development. For example, the completed php7 compliance project(this thing was huge), the completed right to left language support, and the ongoing UI refactoring. It’s my opinion that what likely brought these entities and developers to the project were userbase growth(those downloads…); when the users increase, then the support needs grow. And at this point in time, we are actually in a surplus of active developers with the main bottleneck being the actual code review and integration of code into the codebase. So, perhaps something OEMR(and the OpenEMR community) could think about in the future is a mechanism to create more incentive for developers to participate in the code reviews.
- Regarding coordination. As Tony eludes to, this is a tough one. Lets use UI refactoring as an example. Over the last 5-10 years there have been numerous entitities that have planned/initiated work on this without completing it. Because of this, it’s difficult to gauge whether a entity will even complete the project, much less then coordinate the project with other multiple entities (note bootstrap is not yet in the codebase
). That being said, coordination has been proven to happen when required for viabillity of groups/vendors and/or when there is available funding, which both MU1 (and soon MU2) have proven.
-brady
aethelwulffe wrote on Wednesday, April 13, 2016:
Brady, you must must resign from the board to be designated as Executive Director. Further, you must conduct all operations and activities related to operations under the heading of OEMR. This means that personal attributions, assets etc… are not activities related to OEMR. If you are going under the flag of OEMR, your activites will be OEMR.org, done at OEMR.org, for OEMR.org, and by OEMR.org; be it volunteer or salaried position.
aethelwulffe wrote on Wednesday, April 13, 2016:
As Stephen has indicated, should the board permit it, and I find nothing in the bylaws that preclude us from “permitting” the action to be taken, if we are indeed taking action to hire (volunteer or not, this is a hire) an Executive Director, then we will not be completing this action by the closure of the meeting. I decline to act as proxy for Kevin and Tony (appreciate you confidence though) in such an important matter in any case. Such a thing has been my hope, but it must not be taken in a manner that blind-sides anyone.
bradymiller wrote on Wednesday, April 13, 2016:
The bylaws appear to disagree with your statement. See my post here regarding this issue:
https://sourceforge.net/p/openemr/discussion/oemr_501c3/thread/8c27204e/#ec33
bradymiller wrote on Wednesday, April 13, 2016:
Hi Art,
The nomination was presented here by the Personnel Committee 12 days ago and has been discussed on this forum thread since. This is not a timeline that should blind-side anyone. If the board decides during the meeting tomorrow that this issue should be postponed, then that would be reasonable; but we should leave this decision to the board.
-brady