Open Source Project "MEDICAL DATA INSIGHT". Open Call for Technical/Non Technical Collaboration

Nepal Medical Data Visualization( NMDV)

Back in 2015 me with my teammates Shradha, Rizu and Bishwas decided to do a project which will focus on Health Sector of Nepal. This was the last semester project that we would be doing back then. So we named our project as "Nepal Medical Data Visualization". Project was supervised by Dr. Rabindra Bista. Project was developed usign PHP, JavaScript, JQuery, HTML and CSS. I committed the code on github and didn't even look back for a long time.

Last year, I joined Verscend Technologies via Internship program. Verscend  is a company that works on Health Care Information/Data of the United States. My semester project was a key which get me through the internship Program. All credit goes to Rabindra Sir. While working on a Healthcare Informatics Company I always wanted to rewrite my Project and make it meaningful. I wanted to make it open source and wanted to see it implemented in the community someday in future. This is when Medical Data Insight happened.

The Project Title

NMDV this title was suitable and descriptive but it had Nepal with it. I thought let's not bound Open Source Project within a geographical boundary and removed word Nepal. Now it was Medical Data Visualization, but still I was not satisfied with the name specially the word 'Visualization'. The word 'Insight' was in my mind and I found it more promising and attractive than Visualization. Because as per my understanding Visualizing something was just focusing on the data representation. But Insight was something vast. It not only meant focusing on the represented data but also unfold the hidden Information/insight among the data. Being insightful also means understanding a subject from diverse analysis and trying to find meaning of unanswered logic . This was how the Project got it's Title "MEDICAL DATA INSIGHT"   

Open Sourcing Medical Data Insight

In Our Open Source Community we talk about open sourcing not only the Product but also the process. So this was a golden opportunity for this project to Open Source it's process as well as the source code as product. Being in its initial phase, open sourcing the process helps contributors across the globe to:

• Understand the Product/
• Familiarize with the Cross Culture Working Environment of a Open Source Project 
• Contribute in Projects Core Architecture.
• Comment on the designs of overall interface.
• and many more...

I started breaking the branches of huge tree and started to make a pack of small sticks. Tree, branches, sticks sounds funny, isn't it?. Actually I started breaking the concept of the project into small peaces. And peace by peace, from creating a large feature to User stories I created number of small tasks. Having good experience of Agile Software Development from Verscend, I implemented it by creating a Board at Waffle to maintain all those issues, features, bugs, pull requests, and everything that comes during software development.

And this is how the Userstory, Tasks, Features and Bugs are listed here at Waffle.

Waffle: MDI

In addition to the userstories and a Waffle Board I've created Milestones in GitHub which looks like this:

GitHub Milestones: Medical Data Insight

Current Status of Project

Currently This project is in it's beginner level. After I deprecated the OLD PHP CODE and created a tag, those PHP code base are cleaned from the master branch. Many things are still to be done regarding this projects.

Interesting thing about this Project is that I researched a lot of frameworks and languages in order to decide one for formally moving ahead. Currently AngularJs and ElectronJs are two such promising Fronend Frameworks which I prefer for this Project. So there are always room for improvements are everyone are welcome to contribute, comment and collaborate. 

• Many things like the Backend Development Language, Database, Design, are yet to be decided.
• A team of core contributors and maintainers are yet to be decided.

• CODE_OF_CONDUCT  is currently adapted from GitHub which is also to be discussed and updated.
• CONTRIBUTING GUIDELINES are also to be decided.

Final Words

I want to do a open source project to have an experience of working with cross-cultural expertise across the globe and finally contribute/give back to the community.

If anybody out there is interested in contributing a couple of hours every week for a right cause, please send me an email at: sigdelsanjog@gmail.om or admin@techjhola.com. Or you can also join our Slack Channel: medicaldatainsight.slack.com Walking a long road all alone is hard and sometimes not motivating So I'm optimistic about getting huge response from all of you open minded People.

 Also if you think that your friend might get interested  to contribute , please share this request to him/her.

Namaste.

Project Moderator, Medical Data Insight