Paul and I gave a presentation on OpenMRS at the 10th Biennial Regenstrief Conference. The conference topic was “Transformational Change in Healthcare Systems.” What we learned (and what got us to this talk) came out a gift from Tom Inui: a book called Getting To Maybe. We discovered that there’s smarter people than us who have defined the process we’ve been experiencing over the past few years. Reading the book is a little scary, since it describes our journey so well.
Preparing this talk was very helpful, since it helped us reflect and define the values that have helped us get this far. Of course, we’re still (and always will be) learning and making mistakes. Lately, I’ve been saying “How do you succeed when the only way to learn is through failure?” Maybe we’re just managing to fail at failing.
We’re just getting started at the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit 2007 at Google Headquarters. There are hundreds of participants here from 114 different organizations. At the moment, I’m sitting in a talk on how to turn students/interns into successful committers and beyond.
The SilverStripe folks shared some nice ideas, a couple that I didn’t want to forget…
Having a basic coding test for applicants to help measure/understand coding skills
Ask students to make a screencast showing their work
NOTE: I started a wiki page to log these and other ideas.
