Downloading and Volunteering

Submitted by irv on Wed, 2007-09-19 07:21
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Greetings all:

As Foundation Board Director, I see the numbers of requests to help with clinical correlates, programming, billing and reporting for FreeMED. We at the Foundation depend on you the user for our direction, our upgrades and help to make FreeMED what you want it to be.

Of the more than 300 volunteers on our download forms, only two have responded to our return letters asking for volunteer help with FreeMED.

If you are in the community and wish to help with the coming iteration of FreeMED, if you have been contacted but are waiting, please don't. We need your help now.

Think about how you might wish to see FreeMED work for you or for clients with whom you are working. Think about design features which would help the program then become a member of the programming team, reporting team or work with our clinical correlates and outcomes teams.

Thanks.

Irving J. Buchbinder, DPM, DABPS
Director, FreeMED Software Foundation

Quite frankly, PHP is not my
Submitted by RussNelson on Sat, 2007-10-06 14:49.

Quite frankly, PHP is not my favorite programming language. On the other hand, I stick with Freemed because Jeff is very obviously an experienced and capable project head, and I feel that Freemed has the best chance of gaining enough users to have a viable community. An Open Source project without a community of contributing users is nothing. And I don't mean just programming -- people can contribute bug reports, feature suggestions, UI design improvements (which Jeff has admitting to *loathing*), success stories (they serve to encourage other project members) and anything else. At this stage of a project, even whinging about it helps, because that brings out responses from people.

Getting 0.9 out there will be the biggest help. Release early, release often.

Thanks!
Submitted by jeff on Thu, 2007-10-11 16:18.

That was a wonderful endorsement. I do loathe UI development, but do it out of necessity.

I'm trying to make sure that 0.9.x is stable in all the right ways before releasing it. I don't think I'm wrong in saying that releasing an unstable FreeMED would be catastrophic, so I'm trying to tighten up installation and basic user interaction issues. This series involved a complete backend and UI rewrite, so there's a lot of new code out there which needs some serious testing.

Throw some ideas at us, let's see if we can polish this thing up and get it released!

(And once again, thanks not only to Russ, but to the community at large, which has been very patient and supportive of this process.)

Jeff Buchbinder
Project Head
FreeMED Software Foundation, Inc
http://freemedsoftware.org/