aethelwulffe wrote on Monday, August 01, 2011:
I lied. I just can’t stay away….this is too important to many of the folks that depend on me.
Elegant solutions:
“Web forum must die”…
How about “I request a feature that will allow me to avoid communication by anything other than e-mail subscriptions, and allow me to post to the same message base”. I feel that is an approach that you could live with, despite the horror of knowing that someone else has different values and uses for the information and is accessing it in a different manner?
Otherwise unless you intend to gather up all your e-mails, rolls of papyrus etc… catalog and sort them all so that someone other than yourself can make sense of them…filter and sort the wandering topics and details of your conversations into meaningful discourses, then perhaps someone other than yourself can make use of them. Have you noticed the following issues?:
1. Documentation for the software stinks. The best of it is some well written stuff that gives an overview of some work processes. Of course it is not very extensive, all the screenshots are from ancient versions…oh, I could go on… Believe it or not, Coders are not automatically “Developers”, and “Developers” are not automatically Coders. Developers are systems engineers. Systems require modularity and documentation in order to serve in the short term, and to evolve in the long term. Coders of this software have not, and possibly could not document it’s use. Code is not very useful unless it is used, and quality documentation addresses features and shortfalls of the program. An integrated forum that is organized by a DEDICATED technical writer is invaluable in achieving a finished product. Have you been publishing lately? Perhaps you do not feel this is a real issue/concern at all, and we have no common ground for discussion. Myself, I use mailing lists on my projects, but if I had to visit the forum to ensure that important topics of discussion, tutorials, codebits, and all the manifold elements of communicated ideas of the whole community (not just code writers) are used to advise developers, writers, base programers, code/form contributors and all persons of different levels of involvement so that when someone looks at OpenEMR they don’t decide to use it because the price is so cheap that they can afford to spend a few thousand hours figuring it out. (Cheap stereo…complete with stereo instructions).
2. Using a forum does not mean that you have to visit it! It is an elegant solution. It avoids destroying the benefits of the forum to the community to accommodate your individual workflow with a select patch of isolated coders.
3. The codebase and database are…organic. At some point, the project will need a complete renovation. This type of re-development needs widely accessible white papers, editable project markups, outlines and graphics for the backbone+modules association, lists of naming conventions, commentation guidelines, project and org charts, and organized discussions of topics to suit the modular OBJECT ORIENTED approach. You can’t achieve that by swapping twitter feeds or piling up shit in everyone’s inbox. If you have no experience with well run organized approaches like this, that’s because they are rare. So are exceptional products.
Art Eaton
Sailor/Engineer/Adventurer….and OEMR board member deus ex machina.