✏️ CHT Community Meetup Notes

Community Community Calls
20

7 October 2025 Call

:globe_with_meridians: French interpretation available

Recap & Updates from Last Meeting

a) High Storage Use & Cost Reduction (TCO - Total Cost of Ownership)

  • Update from mrjones: A significant reduction in disk space (up to 30% for large instances) is expected with the upcoming CHT 5.0 release in Q4, due to the new CouchDB Nouveau architecture.

  • Feedback on TCO Documentation:

    • There was a suggestion to include long-term, longitudinal cost forecasts that account for project scaling and increased activity, not just initial proof-of-concept costs.

    • Question on whether TCO could include user-side costs (e.g., devices for CHWs). The team confirmed it currently focuses on server/hosting costs, but there is a plan to expand documentation to cover implementation costs (training, devices), acknowledging these will vary by project and country.

    • There was an emphasis on the need for real-world cost data from existing deployments to make TCO estimates more accurate for new partners.

b) Other Previous Topics

  • Historical Data Cleanup: Discussion on removing old data synced to Postgres, but not from CHW devices.

  • Hosting Costs: Ongoing work to improve documentation to help partners budget for their projects.

Ongoing Work & New Features

  • Bluetooth Data Sharing: Being tested by MSF and ICRC. The community will be updated on wider adoption after more testing.

  • AI Explorations:

    • Experimenting with a multi-agent AI system to help generate feature code.

    • Exploring AI for task prioritization and route optimization for CHWs, aiming to increase impact and CHW well-being. This is a joint effort with Hareet.

    • A dedicated AI meeting is planned where @hareet will present more details.

  • Android Notifications:

    • A feature release with Android notifications is expected in weeks, not months.

    • This will be released in a Feature Release branch first for testing before being folded into a main release.

Community Priorities & Open Discussion

a) CHT Plugins (Lead: @jkuester )

  • Goal: Increase CHT’s flexibility by allowing custom plugins for deployment-specific workflows without bloating the core framework.

  • Inspiration: Driven by real use cases from Western Cape.

  • Next Steps: Form a squad to define an MVP. Community members are encouraged to:

    • Comment on the forum post.

    • Volunteer to join the squad.

  • Potential Use Cases Shared:

    • Kenya: A need for supervision workflows with aggregated data views, which currently requires a separate external dashboard.

b) Community Contributor Spotlight

  • @Najuna_Brian : Shared his positive experience joining the community with no prior coding experience and has already merged 6 PRs. He highlighted the community’s supportive and welcoming nature.

  • @Edwin : Expressed gratitude for the community’s support and shared positive feedback from CHWs in Uganda on new features like task prioritization. He is also mentoring new contributors.

Announcements:

  • Agenda for Next Meeting: A deeper dive into AI use cases.

  • Community members are encouraged to propose topics for future meetings via the chat or the forum.

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