SolDevelo Foundation: Summary of 2021 Year

Social Impact Foundation

Our mission in Foundation since 2018 is clear – we share our knowledge and put human aspects into a code. We are connecting the industry of IT with marketing, public relations, and building community. Except that, we are showing how big an influence technology can have on our developing world.

We are trying to pay attention to these projects and activities which can help non-profit organizations develop and achieve their goals. It’s very important for us to support only valuable organizations, because together we can help people all around the world. Our services and cooperations with partners are free of charge. We are focusing on social good, not getting richer.

This year brought us many challenges and difficulties, but as always we’ve been trying to think positive and move forward. We were able to finish a few projects and make a connection with new partners. But our biggest achievement was, without a doubt, the finalization of designing the OpenMRS website.

New website for OpenMRS

After 1.5 year of hard work, many discussions and even more versions, we’ve finished the new OpenMRS website. In August 2021 the website was released and finally became public. OpenMRS, Open Medical Record System, is one of the biggest open-source software, which helps hospitals and clinics manage clients’ data.

We are proud that we can participate in this project and gain important experience during this journey. We can say that this is one of the greatest projects in which we, as a foundation, can have our impact.

But this isn’t the end of our work on the website, because we still need to improve it, adding new functions and developing it. With a great team (our group is called Website Re-Vitalization Squad), which we created with Jennifer (Community Director) and Grace, together we are ready to face new challenges and continue our partnership.

OpenMRS Implementers’ Conference

OpenMRS Implementers’ Conference is an annual event participated by implementers, supporters, donors and volunteers from all over the world.

This year the conference was held for the 15th time, and for the 15th time it gathered people from all over the world, joining us to help create this event. Each participant had a voice in the process of shaping our topics and discussions. The unconferencing format of the event enabled our guests to be directly involved in determining the focus of sessions. Each year this event is for our team enriching experience.

The conference was held on Zoom, like in the 2020, and lasted for 4 days, from 29th November to 2nd December. During this time a variety of sessions took place, welcoming every person that wished to join and listen.

Partners in Health (PIH), Johnson & Johnson, MEKOM Solutions, AMPATH, SolDevelo, Thoughtworks, CDC, HealthIT, IntelliSOFT Consulting Ltd, Jembi Health System, Regenstrief Institute, UNICEF, Google and many more showed up to participate in this special event.

Google Summer of Code 2021

Google Summer of Code is a global program focused on introducing students to open-source software development. The program lasts 10 weeks (18 hours per week) while students work on programming projects with an open-source organization. Projects cover a wide range of fields including Cloud, Operating Systems, Graphics, Medicine, Programming Languages, Robotics, Science, Security and many more.

In the year 2021, on the 7th June, the next edition of this program started. In the 2021 edition of GSoC a student from Poland participated. Bartłomiej Rasztabiga is studying Computer Science at Warsaw University of Technology. He’s been working on a project called The REST of Administration.

What is interesting, there are a few changes in the 2022 GSoC edition, for example the program is open for all newcomers, not only university students. Also, Contributors will be able to choose a size of project – medium (~ 175 hours) or large (~ 350 hours). The last change is increased flexibility around timing in projects – participants can better fit the GSoC program in their current life situation.

We hope that by these changes the program will be more affordable and more of you could participate in it. The open source ecosystem has evolved since GSoC’s first edition in 2005 of the program and organizators want to update it to meet the needs of our communities. 

At the same time we are proud that a valuable program like this reaches every corner of the world and we can help each year organize it and support participants.

Foundation in numbers

In 2021 Foundation published 49 articles in a year, which gave us c.a. 4 per month (it’s as much as we assumed). During the year our page has been watched 80 thousands times by 72 thousands of users who generate 81 thousands of sessions. It’s a better score than last year, but we want to move forward and make even better results incoming year.

Currently we are present on 4 social platforms which are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Also, 2 more people joined our team.

Meet our team

New persons in Foundation

For some time we’ve been thinking about enlarging our team. In December we finally managed to do that and our squad joined Anna and Julia. They take care of social media, write texts on blog and support all activities in the Foundation.

We hope that by working together and sharing creative ideas our Foundation can bloom and we will reach more people and projects than before.

In our first weeks of working together we created new accounts on Twitter and Instagram. By that we are trying to introduce ourselves as experts in our industry and make bonds with network communities and followers.

Foundation’s goals for 2022

And if you’re interested in what happened in earlier years you can look here.