Developing Processes and Tools for Maintaining OpenMRS Documentation

Primary  Objective:

Develop a clear process and tools to help community members maintain OpenMRS documentation

Project Description

We often hear that our documentation is out-of-date or duplicative. Our garden has become somewhat overcome with weeds and it's hard to find what is needed. In 2019, we worked with a technical writer to re-organize our Wiki and we're in the process of implementing those recommendations. We now have the garden designed and we're starting to put everything in a location that makes sense for our audiences. There's still weeding to be done and to avoid having a chaotic garden again, we need some guidance and tools that will help us maintain our documentation and keep it relevant.

Possible outputs that could be developed include: mechanisms to help identify, prioritize, and schedule documentation improvements; conventions and templates that are easy to access and follow; a style guide for our Wiki; etc.  One example, would be coming up with a convention for labeling wiki pages that our outdated or pages in the wrong location. A Confluence macro could be used to display all such tagged pages as an automatic work queue for documentation improvement. Another example would be to create a page or process to identify all pages under “active projects” that haven’t been modified for > 1 year as candidates to be archived.

Skills Needed

• Knowledge on developing documentation processes and Standard Operating Procedures
• Knowledge on techniques and approaches to reduce entropy in open source documentation

Objectives at the end of the Assignment :

• Processes and operating procedures on how to continuously update user documentation in a seamless manner

Related Resources

Documentation Work Needed