OpenMRS in
GSoC 2021
OpenMRS is a global community that has developed an open-source Electronic Medical Record system (EMR), created to support healthcare in low and middle-income countries. It serves as a replacement for traditional, paper records, improving the workflow inside of a healthcare facility, as well as the quality of diagnosis and treatments. As result, it enables medical workers to successfully treat even more people and save even more lives.
Spectrum of a Project
01
Our Goal
Providing the Google Summer of Code 2021 admins with support. Helping and assisting them throughout the whole event. Promoting the event on social media. Supporting students during the project phase.
02
Challenges
The main obstacles on our way were the time zone differences and language barriers. The voluntary nature of the whole project also made it difficult to achieve efficient cooperating methods.
The Case
Google Summer of Code is a global initiative developed by Google. It was created to promote open-source projects and help students around the world improve their coding skills and gain valuable experience. Every year hundreds of open-source organizations join the event, and together with contributors create great things. Since 2022 the Google Summer of Code is open not only for students, but for all developers that are willing to participate in the project. GSoC contributors are shaping the future of code every single summer.
OpenMRS is already one of the GSoC veterans. They have been participating for many years and successfully finished a lot of valuable projects. As OpenMRS’ partners, during the Google Summer of Code 2021 we assisted them in the process of bonding with contributors and mentoring them. We were challenged to keep the participants motivated and engaged in the project. We also had to come up with interesting ways to promote the event on social media, and to describe students’ projects online.
The Effect
Many students that participated in Google Summer of Code continued their journey with OpenMRS even after the event ended. We are proud to say that one of the contributors was from Poland! Students’ commitment and hard work helped in improving many OpenMRS projects by implementing new features, enhancing program’s safety and refining the quality of the code. Google Summer of Code also played a great role in promoting OpenMRS and its contribution in the development of digital health among young people.