Carl Leitner Begins His Journey to the HIS Unconference in Ghana

I am waiting at the airport for my flight to Accra and I am very excited about the upcoming health information system (HIS) unconference hosted at the Kofi Annan Centre for Excellence - AITI with support from WAHO and HMN . While many participants will be from the ECOWAS member states, we also have some iHRIS developers from Botswana and Lesotho. My suitcase has been checked with two iHRIS Appliances, a host of books donated by O'Reilly , and some really large printouts of the form maps for iHRIS Manage and iHRIS Qualify. I really feel like a digital nomad as my backpack is full of various electronic knick-nacks to help smooth over any tecnhnical hiccups we run into.

Several major open source HIS, such as iHRIS, openMRS and DHIS , will be represented and we will be working closely with and training regional developers. For the training the organizers are trying to follow as closely as possible an unconference principal for designing the curricula -- the participants will get to define what they are the most interested in learning and what the pressing needs are for the next five days of this gathering. It will be interesting to see how much our guesses will match with what the participants really want. In any case, I have been trying hard to follow the HIBBs model to break up training material into small units that can be reused and tried to make them not all about iHRIS ;-) I suspect a lot of late nights as we develop the materials for the next day.

Concurrent with the training are some other cool things:
• We will also host an Installfest for Ubuntu on Monday afternoon.
• There is a SDMX-HD Connectathon where developers for the various HIS software components will be working on connecting their systems using the international data standard, SDMX-HD.
• A discussion of the PHIT -- hopefully we can really bring the iHRIS side of things forward.

Coming into the unconference there are some nifty things going on with iHRIS as well. I hope that I will have plenty of time to announce and discuss these things with the other developers:
• We have just released version 4.0.7 of the iHRIS Suite
• We have started a new Retention-Intervention Costing Model following the framework outlined in WHO's Recommendations
• We have started development 4.1 code base including a more granular permissioning system which allows for several long requested features such as the Self-Service module which is already in the development 4.1 code.
• We have iHRIS translated fully to French, Portuguese, Italian, and Swahili.
• We have been working closely with translatewiki on having a second translation mechanism so that we can target their pool of translators in Spanish and Arabic (with Dutch coming for free!). They have already marked several problem areas where the English source text is poor quality for translation.
• iHRIS Manage is set to go live at the MoHSW of Lesotho and Christian Health Association of Lesotho