[Gnumed-devel] gnumed.conf.de review

[Sebastian Hilbert]

Hi !

I am back from a snowboarding trip. Unfortunately I broke my right should so 
hacking is a no go currently. I still managed to hack up some news with one 
arm so here we go. I am pretty sure I forgot someting but since this is a 
mailing list people can add as needed.

On Dec. 13th 2003 the first German Gnumed conference took place in Leipzig, 
Germany. 9 people attended the meeting on Saturday. The group consisted of 
four Gnumed hackers, people from related open source projects and a business 
person.
There were 4 presentations held by different people. Presentation slides will 
be available for download soon.

Sebastian Hilbert shed light on GNUmed's history, identified current 
development related problems and listed some goals for Gnumed's future.

Karsten Hilbert explained programming concepts, choices made during 
development and much more. He concluded his presentation with a code 
walk-trough, explaining underlying concepts on-the-fly.

Hilmar Berger gave a presentation on his drug-database plugin for Gnumed.

This session was followed by some technical talk which led to a better 
understanding of Gnumed's codebase by the attendees.

We finally addressed some problems with Gnumed's Web-appearance. We basically 
decided to merge all three domains/sites into one site.

There was a consensus reached on the fact that Gnumed needs better 
documentation. In order to attract more developers to Gnumed we need to 
document what is already there. This led to a discussion about shortness of 
resources. We are basically in need of a person that writes documentation 
targeted at new developers.

We took a look at Gnumed' proposed roadmap and identified many show-stoppers 
for a 1.0 version. Many item have not been claimed by any developer.

There was some discussion about using Gnumed for well defined real-world 
projects but it became evident that Gnumed lacks essential features. 
Basically the backend is there, the frontend is there but there seems to be 
little effort to hack the connection between the two.

Talking about attrating new developers we found no new ways to do this.
We concluded that although there is a large potential userbase no considerable 
input can be expected.

What needs to be done ?

- document Gnumed's codebase and concepts
- attract new developers
- unify Gnumed's websites
- focus on Gnumed's roadmap