✏️ CHT Community Meetup Notes

Community Community Calls
1

11 February 2025 Call

We’re thrilled to share the exciting outcomes of our recent inaugural Community Meetup, where community members came together to set the agenda and direction for the CHT’s future. This is your chance to be part of a collaborative, vibrant community that’s shaping the tools and systems that impact lives globally.

At the meetup, we embraced a “Community First” approach, introduced by Nekesa, our Director of Community at Medic. This approach centers on growing a thriving community of practice where everyone has a voice in determining the priorities for the CHT and its roadmap. The community first approach encourages all of us to be part of a collaborative, vibrant community that’s shaping the tools and systems that impact lives globally.

With over 50 participants from diverse organizations, the energy and ideas shared were inspiring—and we’re just getting started!

Here’s a glimpse of what we discussed and how you can contribute:

Key Priorities from the Community

  1. Governance
  • It was highlighted that there is a need for a clear governance structure to guide how the community operates. Suggestions included:
    • Developing governance standards collaboratively.
    • Learning from well-established communities in our ecosystem.
    • Establishing clear roles and responsibilities, transparent decision-making processes, and contribution guidelines and prioritization of CHT features and improvements.
    • Creating feedback mechanisms and maintaining up-to-date documentation.
  • Interested organizations: D-Tree, LG, Medic.
  • We will have a planning call themed ‘CHT Community Governance’ on Thursday 20th February at 1 PM GMT.
  • Here is the calendar invite.
  1. Campaigns
  • This was another area of interest. There is a need for features that support campaigns, such as:
    • Workflows to alert Community Health Workers (CHWs) during campaigns.
    • Tools to turn campaigns on/off seamlessly.
    • Microplanning capabilities for managers and accessible campaign data.
  • This is a great opportunity for developers and implementers to collaborate on innovative solutions!
  • We will discuss this further in our upcoming meetup.
  1. Interoperability
  • Loukman shared the importance of ensuring the CHT interoperates with more systems, aligning with ongoing work on the CHT FHIR API.
  • If you’re passionate about interoperability, this is your chance to get involved and help define the workflows and systems we integrate with. Reach out on the CHT forum and check out CHT Interoperability Github repository.

How You Can Get Involved

  • Individual Contributors:
    • We had 2 developers based in Kampala and Nairobi expressing interest in supporting community led initiatives.
    • We also had a developer from the Paramedic Network expressing interest to contribute to the technical team.
    • If you’d like to join them, reach out and let us know how you’d like to help on the CHT community forum.
  • Developers Hour:
    • Join our upcoming Developers Hour on 27th February 2025!
    • This is a space for developers to share challenges, ask questions, and collaborate with CHT core developers. Whether you’re troubleshooting an issue or exploring new ideas, this is your chance to connect and grow.

Why Join Us?

  • Shape the Future: Your ideas and contributions will directly influence the CHT’s roadmap and impact.
  • Collaborate with a Global Network: Work alongside passionate individuals and organizations from around the world.
  • Learn and Grow: Be part of a community that values knowledge-sharing, innovation, and collective problem-solving.

Next Steps

  • We are convening the first CHT Governance Call on Thursday, 20th Feb 2025 at 1 PM GMT.
  • Share Your Priorities: What do you think the CHT community should focus on? Let us know! You can reach out on the CHT Community Forum.
  • Join the Conversation: Participate in upcoming meetups, CHT Dev Hour, or governance discussions.
  • Reach Out: If you’re ready to contribute, email us or join the next call.
  • We will have our next Community Meetup on Tuesday, 25th February at 4 PM GMT. Here is the link to join and calendar invite.

Together, we can build a stronger, more resilient CHT community that empowers everyone who relies on it. Let’s make a difference—one collaboration at a time.

You can access part of the recording here.
We can’t wait to see what we’ll achieve together!

The CHT Community Team.

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2

25 February 2025 Call

Thank you again for your active engagement at the 2nd CHT Community Meetup.

We have uploaded the recording here and below are some highlights from our discussion:

1. Recap of our first CHT Community Meetup.
We had our first CHT Community Meetup event on Feb 11 where we discussed the Community First pivot which focuses on building an inclusive CHT community and empowering community members to participate, engage and actively contribute to the CHT. In that meeting, we also dived deeper into some of the CHT and CHT community priorities and needs, the priorities that we discussed have been documented in this sheet. As a way forward, we will form various focused working groups to work on specific initiatives, community members and organizations will be invited to join the working groups to contribute in co-designing and developing solutions.

2. Ideas on how we can increase CHT community participation and contribution.
Community members shared a number of approaches that we can adopt to help grow the CHT community and increase community contributions and engagements, this included:

  • Having the required technical capacity and resources within the community to guide new contributors.
  • Implementing CHT fellowship and mentorships programs.
  • We could explore using Artificial intelligence (AI) to help provide support and guidance to CHT users.
  • Providing a sandbox environment to enable Developers to experiment, test and learn.
  • Forming community squads to support deeper collaboration, mentorship and cross learning while building CHT improvements.
  • Ensuring there is modularity in the CHT architecture to allow for changes to be made in small modules.

It was also suggested that a list of existing squads, anticipated squads and high level information of the work the existing squads are working on should be shared in public places to allow community members to see ongoing and upcoming initiatives for them to contribute based on their interest.

3. Making CHT FHIR Compliant.
It was highlighted the second time that there is a need to make CHT FHIR compliant so that it is easy to interoperate CHT with other systems. There is already ongoing work on CHT FHIR interoperability, a community group will be formed to deep dive into the CHT interoperability work and the areas that can be improved.

4. Governance Discussion and Updates.
CHT Community Governance was raised as one of the priorities for CHT during the first CHT Community Meetup, hence a call to discuss CHT governance was organized on Feb 20. At the governance call, various community members outlined insightful questions which covered the following topics: governance structure (how conflicts will be resolved and will Medic continue to be the CHT maintainer), platform sustainability (there are risks of community members forking CHT to meet their needs), development and prioritisation of features and community participation and contributions. More details about what was discussed can be accessed here. The Next governance call will be held on March 6 at 2:00 PM GMT. This event will be a great opportunity for you to continue to share ideas on how we can make our community more inclusive, you can join this meeting using this Zoom Link.

The governance group will continue to have more follow up conversations to define and understand the priorities which will inform the necessary structures that need to be set up to support the community first approach, the group will keep the community updated on their progress.

We hope to see each other again at the next Governance call on March 6 at 2pm GMT. Please plan to join other upcoming community calls including: the CHT Community Meetup which will be happening on March 11 at 1pm GMT and the March 2025 Round-up call which has been scheduled for March 13 at 1pm GMT.

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11 March 2025 Call

What are your priorities for the CHT:
Below are some of the priorities raised in this call:

  1. Interoperability

    • OpenHIE v2 - can the CHT can be shipped in OpenHIE v2 setup
    • Let’s Deep Dive with Instant OHIE 2.0! - OpenHIE
    • moh-kenya being deployed with OpenHIM
    • Maya Health Alliance Joined after seeing event on OpenMRS - interested in hearing more about interoperability with OpenMRS
      • Migration to Bahmi & OpenMRS
      • Looking to provide better services where network connection is poor

  2. There was a question on the need for Looking for the CHT apps availability for iPhone users in App Store: Bringing CHT to iOS - #6 by Pawan_KB

  3. Updates about the Governance of the CHT will be shared in subsequent meetings

  4. There was a question on how the CHT is deployed, see more details here: How do you host and deploy the CHT?

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4

25 March 2025 Call

:globe_with_meridians: French interpretation available

  • Discussion about how to get started with the CHT. What is the experience for the first time contributors?
  • CHT Governance
    • Looking to learn what would be the best practices to incorporate in the community - how we nurture the community
    • How do encourage people to share? How do we give direction without being controlling?
    • There are many more use cases out there and the potential of the CHT is huge and the governance can help us to nurture that.
    • The CHT is a big tool and it can be challenging to navigate it. The documentation for the first time contributors is well structured, but it’s not easy to get it started. What skillsets are of advantage for the different squad? The description of issues are not clear what the issues are about.
    • Who should be in the governance? How many orgs should be in the governance?
    • What needs governed?
    • How are decisions made about what goes in the CHT Roadmap?
    • Examples: OpenHIE use working group for technical decisions. They also use steering committees to give direction to the working groups.
    • When we talk about governance, I think of three elements: vision, decision-making processes, and the impact of initiatives. Am I on the right track, or are there other dimensions to consider?
  • Discussion with a government who had a question about ownership. They don’t have the skills to keep the CHT deployment running at this point. How should we be positioning the CHT? Ease of manipulation by developers (as the CHT requires a bit of a challenge, compared to tools like DHIS2) What are the challenges of adoption?
    • The CHT is customizable, but not LCNC. It is easy to customize, but more challenging to contribute.
    • We are still far from LC. We are closer to LC than other technologies, but still not there.
  • Mobile Device Management
    • Many advantages to using MDM
    • Fundamental problem and barrier for deploying eCHIS at scale
    • Big problem within global digital health
    • Challenging to find affordable options
    • Tried to deploy https://h-mdm.com/ for a national deployment and face some challenges. The phones are not very powerful, not powerful CPU, just enough RAM, users noticed slowness on the devices.
    • Older forum discussion
    • Deployment using SureMDM
    • The discussion will continue on the Forum to identify more community members who are interested to participate in this conversation.
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