Opening up

July 07, 2023 by Vinay Venu

Hello

I hope you are having a good day. I definitely am.

Over the past few months,

there have been a few developments on the Avni project that made us think more about how to organise the team, the communication and the work. What changes?

  1. Deployments outside Avni hosted service

    1. ThoughtWorks is working on using Avni for one of their projects. This is for a pilot project for the Govt of Karnataka in the area of health
    2. Leadership For Equity has been running an Avni deployment where they have a TEACH tool meant for the government school infrastructure of Andhra Pradesh. We are planning for the infrastructure to be migrated to government servers

  2. Development work by people outside Samanvay Foundation (the primary contributor to Avni and maintainer of the cloud service)

    1. ColoredCow worked on development of the Media Viewer that was released as part of 3.40.0
    2. Akanksha Sinha and Avinash Ramachandruni are working on a project through Code for Government Tech (C4GT)
    3. There are contributions being planned by ThoughtWorks to support their workflow

  3. Self-service implementations

    1. Some organisations are coming forward to take care of their own app creation on Avni, with minimal support
  4. Issues with a released apk that caused serious trouble for one organisation

What these mean is that

  1. The development process and roadmap of Avni needs to be more open and eventually more collaborative
  2. We need low friction communication between the core Avni team and others, who may or may not have a contractual relationship with Samanvay Foundation
  3. We need to find ways of gathering release feedback from everyone, and find ways to get more eyes on before something goes live

So we decided to

  1. Move the Avni product development process from Zenhub to Github to provide a public no-login view of the current work and roadmap
  2. Slightly reorganised the documentation. Other users using Avni have helped strengthen the documentation
  3. Added a public beta release process for the Android app, where we do not have the ability to roll-back in case of issues. There will be time provided to use the app to ensure there are no glaring issues before it is pushed to production
  4. Added communication channels on Skype for developers and users/implementers

Eventually, we will

need to do other things as well, to enable users have a better say in what needs to go into the product etc. Looking for feedback. Do join the Skype channel, and let the conversation begin.

Tags

Process

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