I honestly have little input/opinion about this. I certainly do not have Wiki access myself, nor do I like Wikimedia for any sort of multi-page documentation. It works great as Wikipedia for single article and data searches, but Wikimedia is a horrible way to write a user’s manual, provide information for the Vendors that have graciously contributed.
I am in favor of OEMR dropping it’s Wiki completely and using different methods to display data. OEMR still must provide the recognition of officially re-branded vendors and contributors that support the software, have donated money etc…but it should not be documentation swiped from the open-emr site, and should be a much more friendly display. I feel OEMR should maintain it’s own database of vendors/contributors, and have a web form on it’s site for it’s administrator (Treasurer I should think) to enter, track and maintain the data, with the displayed public data page dynamically generated from that database. Contributors and members that want recognition, and non-anonymous benefactors should have a web form to enter their own information (and on-line donation) for review and approval.
Upshot: I’m just a board-member at large. This was done at executive director discretion, and I am not privy to the details at this point. That is why we have a redress system.
I have an entirely lateral viewpoint about this (and almost everything else, so I am told), but I feel the OEMR site/server is chock full of bloat, has broken stuff, and needs to get re-written/published before it can even THINK about doing any shit like this. Scratch the OEMR wiki, post the OEMR-specific text somewhere that a non-wikiguru can navigate to, and leave everything else alone until the house is in order, including policies and procedures that cover this sort of thing.
In closing, it seems like every time there is a discussion about what OEMR is doing “Vendor Neutrality” is brought into the equation. I am completely sick of it. It is like the GOP “Class Warfare” or “ObamaCare” statements that are meaningless noise. I am not a Vendor. Bowen is not a vendor. Cahn is not a vendor. Yeh is not a vendor (yet). DiNiro is not a vendor. Bearden is not a vendor. Neuman is not a vendor, Herman is not a vendor. That leaves McCormick, Palanasami, and Hameed. Aside from Tony, the other two don’t spend too much time involved in policy, mostly, they are merely on the receiving end of a long list of requests from OEMR and the project, and seem to be a primary source of contributions to the general project.
Myself, I spend just about every penny of everything I get on bringing openemr to the most needy segment of the health community. None of that money I spend comes from OpenEMR related activities…I have to stop, go earn more money so I can eat while I work on this stuff.
Please stop referring to me as a Vendor.
I’ll echo some of aethelwullfe’s sentiment: I am really just a freelance developer, who cooperates with vendors to produce products their customers want, while releasing all of my works in the open, to help everyone. The only ‘vendor’ like thing about me, is that i prefer to work on some products i’m familiar with, but i’ll work on pretty much anything open.
The culture of this project has always been SO vendor focused, that I find my role as a developer disrespected, and abused, compared to how i treat developers on ‘my’ projects. I continue to respond to maintenance requests for the XML form generator, but I am NOT a vendor.
Sorry, did not mean to offend with the vendor neutral comment. I was just stating it’s important that the contributor and website that manages the Professional Support page is vendor neutral. Ideally, this means the contributor is not a vendor(or professional developer) and the website has no paid advertisements. I agree there are many OEMR board members that are not vendors(or professional developers), however the oemr.org website does have a paid advertisements mechanism(for example, rebranders get “recognized”); this is not a bad thing at all. One of the advantages here is that oemr.org is free to post advertisements (along with rebranders whom pay to rebrand and get “recognized” but do not comply with the Professional Support page guidelines) while the users searching for vendors/developers on the Professional Support page that support OpenEMR are not led astray.
This looks like good stuff. Sorry if my tone comes off a little strong… Receiving an email, and having to reply in a forum makes me a bit hot under the collar. I’ve also been becoming more politically active as part of the occupy movement, so have become a bit more sensitive about confusing the organized efforts of many independent people, with the force of a single orchestrating entity.
I learned a new term today, the wider Open Source community out “there” … calls projects like ours a “Trusted Anarchy”. I do so like the sound of that.
However in order to make it to the next level (OpenMRS, Debian, Drupal, OpenOffice, MySQL for instance) we have to move to a formal governance body, with all that entails. Until we can do that as a team we are not going to be able to take advantage of the place we have carved out for ourselves in the OpenSource AND Medical communities.
Can you please address the above questions (repeated below):
Do you truly think it makes sense to migrate(or mirror) the professional support page to the oemr.org wiki?
If so, who’s gonna fix it now, maintain it, enforce the guideline, and keep track of and build the ‘certified contributor’ pages/templates???
My suggestions to get to your goal of moving to a formal governance body are:
1) First focus on creating the policies and procedures required to form a formal governance body
2) Then focus on forming a membership base
3) Think long-term and think transparency
—A good example of a long-term transparent project is the OpenEMR Professional Support Page on open-emr.org. Note I, as a contributor, spent several months contacting vendors and creating a mechanism and guidelines to improve user accessibility to support while rewarding vendors/developers whom contributed code to the OpenEMR project and note I, as a contributor, am happy to continue maintaining this page because of its importance to the OpenEMR project. For details of the evolution (and the transparency) of this project simply read this forum thread and the following discussion and wiki page: http://open-emr.org/wiki/index.php/Talk:OpenEMR_Professional_Support http://open-emr.org/wiki/index.php/Open_source_openemr#Discuss_how_to_choose_vendor.2Fsupport
— A poor example of a long-term transparent project is OEMR making an “executive” decision on a Saturday night to copy/paste the above Professional Support page from www.open-emr.org to their site in a broken format (missing vital vendors/developers) with disregard of the importance of the above project to OpenEMR and with no plan to maintain it. Disclaimer: Note I could be wrong about this after hearing what the explanation for this is by OEMR; but without any explanation, I am simply left to my own logic.
These types of actions require more explanation than saying, “with all that entails”. Please note all of the previous actions by the OpenEMR project that have not been popular with OEMR were accompanied by detailed explanations.
On a topic unrelated to the above post (but related to this thread), I’ve placed a ‘OpenEMR Professional Support’ button in the top banner of the www.open-emr.org page with the goals described in above thread, particularly:
1. Increasing users’ accessibility to support
2. Increasing traffic to the professional support page
Let me know thoughts and would be glad to get any feedback especially if anybody’s not comfortable with it.
hi I have a problem when we installed in the server could you please let me know once.
Linux server: Error :
Deprecated: mysql_pconnect(): The mysql extension is deprecated and will be removed in the future: use mysqli or PDO instead in /home3/rajeshch/public_html/openemr/library/adodb/drivers/adodb-mysql.inc.php on line 383
Same files if include into local it was working fine.
The error message provided indicates that the mysql extension is in fact present. Deprecated is a warning to developers that the functionality is going away in a future release (PHP 7). The problem is that the server system and the test/local system have different php.ini and are handling the extension differently.
