How You Can Participate

Bahmni is Open Source software developed via contributions from many organizations and individuals. We welcome your contributions, as a developer, subject matter expert, business analyst, or just enthusiastic user, because only by working together can we build the best possible product, that best meets the needs of our current and future users.

There is a core development team that works on the core Bahmni product every day, and a larger ecosystem who implements Bahmni and makes contributions back to the shared core product. We welcome your participation in both!

Our main communications channels are our Discussion Forums (for thoughtful conversations) and Slack (for quick chats), and any questions that you have about contributing to Bahmni should be raised in those channels.

As a Developer

We have quite a backlog of features that we'd like to add to Bahmni that have been requested over the years. Many of these also need some business analysis done, so the best developer is someone who has this skill set, or has friends or colleagues who can do this as well.

The main languages for a Bahmni developer are JavaScript (Angular 1.x for most of the code, but more recently we prefer ReactJS), Java (for server-side OpenMRS code), and Python (for Odoo code).

As a developer you can follow our guides to set up your development environment, and if you're ready to contribute a significant amount of time to Bahmni development, then introduce yourself on the Discussion Forums or Slack, and take a look at our Issue Tracker for open work you could pick up.

As a developer who is deploying Bahmni for an implementation, you can mention any custom changes you're planning to make to the product ahead of time on our public forums, and see if these changes can be coordinated with our roadmap and incorporated into the core product after you make them.

As a Subject Matter Expert

These are one of the most most needed roles in our open source community! If you have domain knowledge and subject matter expertise about any part of medical care, hospital information systems, or patient medical records, then we would love to leverage that expertise.

In your spare time, follow our discussion forums and share your expertise when questions come up about how a feature should work.

Join our fortnightly Product Architecture Team (PAT calls) calls.

If you can dedicate a larger amount of time, then let us know on the Discussion Forums or Slack and we'll try to connect you to a specific project in need.

As a Business Analyst

This is another of the most needed roles in our open source community! If you know how to do research with end users and subject matter experts, and synthesize feature requests into chunks of work that can be picked up by developers, we want to leverage those skills.

In your spare time, follow our discussion forums and look for opportunities where your skills can be of use. (Do you see a developer floundering because they're trying to speculate about how some feature should be built without enough data to back that up? Speak up and volunteer to help do the research.)

Join our fortnightly Product Architecture Team (PAT calls) calls.

If you can dedicate a larger amount of time, then let us know on the Discussion Forums or Slack and we'll try to connect you to a specific project in need.

As a QA Tester

Leading up to our product releases, we try to get as many people as possible looking at our release candidates, and looking for bugs. Follow our discussion forums, or follow us on Twitter, and help out when the call goes out.

During day to day development, our core team does not have consistent QA support. If you can contribute an hour, a day, or a week, there's almost always active development work happening that has not had sufficient QA attention. Introduce yourself on the Discussion Forums or Slack and people can point you to the active work, and where to test it out.

As an organization that wants to participate in Bahmni's collective development

We encourage all organizations using Bahmni to try align their development efforts with our shared roadmap. Start a conversation at https://www.bahmni.org/contact-us/.

In any other role

There's always a way that you can contribute. Introduce yourself on the Discussion Forums or Slack and ask how you can contribute!