Thank you all for your thoughtful feedback and questions at our first governance meeting. The CHT Community Governance was one of the priorities that was raised in our first CHT Community Meetup. Here is the call recording of the governance call and below is the summary of what was discussed.
1. Governance structure.
Community members sought clarity on Medic’s role in ongoing Community First model, Medic continued role as a CHT maintainer and how the community will resolve conflicts.
2. CHT platform sustainability.
Questions were raised about managing risks of platform forking for community members with divergent visions which could lead to multiple CHT variants and how will this model ensure that national deployments can be sustained…
3. Development and prioritization.
There are questions on how community members can submit feature requests and improvements and how features will be prioritized and resourced. There were questions on decision making; what should be the release cycle, will the decision making process be based on contributions or will it be democratic?
4. Community participation and contributions.
The following questions were raised:
Which partners can support governance efforts?
How can partners come in and support the governance effort?
What is the scope of work that the community is expected to contribute to?
What will be the scope of community contribution?
This was a great conversation and such insightful questions informs some of the specific areas we need to dive deeper as we set up the CHT community governance structure. Our next governance call will be held on March 6 at 2:00 PM GMT; we look forward to your participation.
Hear from new participants what kind of questions they have and what they would like to see discussed in the governance call.
Work together on a governance roadmap defining what topics to tackle and in which order. We will also need to define the cadence of the call and working documents.
Notes
Community should be a safe space for everyone to share their ideas and vision for the CHT
Make the CHT more open, more participatory, more inviting
Share learnings about the implementations
CHT should grow into a framework, with modularized components and not features
Cadence
Next call in 2 weeks
Forum for conversations
Google Docs for working docs
Forum for sharing progress with the CHT Community
Topics for next discussions:
What is the governance group? Board, Committee or Council? What do we do vs what we don’t?
How is the governance structure? Is it formalized?
What is the vision of the community? This could lead to the creation of the roadmap
Problem statement for this call: Establish the mission and objectives of the Governance group.
Why does this group exist? What’s our mission?
Questions raised by the group:
From a technical perspective how do we determine who has authorization to be able to make changes to the CHT? Who are the approved committers? How does anyone become part of that group? Who’s the ultimate authority about the technical changes in the CHT?
From a community perspective: How to cultivate a vibrant community? What kind of community interactions should happen?
Related to the above, where is this group’s energy going? Technical or community?
Is the purpose of this group to tackle questions and topics raised during the Governance call, or is the goal to create different subgroups (technical, etc) to tackle those topics?
Governance structures don’t exist in isolation; they exist within existing structures. The community is there. What is the gap this governance structure fills that was not filled in before? We need to measure ourselves against the gap/question. What should we make decisions on?
Who is in this group? Do we welcome more people? Are we the Governance group? Should we plan a governance group and what would that mean?
Are we just making ourselves happy in a call?
Maybe we should go to the governance group only when a question is raised. And this group should put in front of the community the things we want them to vote for.
Could we ask the community about the need for governance? Have a running document where we add our questions and deliberate. This would help with clarity.
Help me understand why we need this group
Additional areas that could be topics for dissemination in this group:
For the CHT implementers, it would be helpful to discuss advocacy needs to push for, such as enabling eCHIS integrations and interoperability with other systems.
Notes:
Start with a border mandate for the governance group, as long as we have representatives for each of the areas that need to be covered (in additional groups or squads, for example)
Medic should be the ultimate decider and propose things to the community, and the community votes.
The governance needs to be more than just the code.
We need collective commitment and more members. Other orgs will be required to provide thought leadership. We should have more orgs/individuals joining the governance team as co-leads.
Next steps:
Andra to connect with Hildah (LG) and Elizabeth (Lwala) and get community’s thoughts about “What is the gap this governance structure fills that was not filled in before?”
