Contributing to OpenHospital: A Team's First Open Source Experience
- Speaker: Abhigna Nimmagadda, Likitha Nanduri, Kok Hua Ng, and Aditi Bonepalli
- Room: 250
- Time: Saturday, Oct 24th 4:30 – 4:50
- Format: Talk (20 minutes)
- Difficulty: Beginner
- Track: Community & Open Source
- Additional Tags: Open Source, HealthTech, First Contributions, Onboarding, OpenHospital
- Experience: Undergraduate Computer Science and Data Science students at the University of Washington Bothell; first-time contributors to production healthcare software.
Description:
OpenHospital is a free and open-source health information management system used in hospitals across Uganda, Ethiopia, and other resource-limited regions to manage patient records, laboratory results, and pharmacy stock. This session shares the journey of a team of four undergraduate students who contributed to the project by tackling various “good first issues,” including reporting infrastructure, interface consistency, localization cleanup, and GUI data accessibility. The presenters will discuss the technical work performed and reflect on the onboarding experience from a student perspective, providing valuable insights for both first-time contributors and maintainers on how to make large open source projects more approachable.
Target Audience:
- First-time open source contributors
- OSS maintainers interested in student onboarding
- Students and educators in computer science programs