DHIS 2.0 decisions

The decision-making process

The DHIS 2.0 project is an open source software development project coordinated by the HISP project. The DHIS 2.0 project leader(s) is appointed by the HISP project's leadership (at University of Oslo). Based on the activity and to some degree quality of the participating developers the project leader will appoint participators as core developers. This is ideally a group of 3-5 developers that contribute to the project frequently and substantially. The project leader(s) and the core developers are the main decision-makers in the project. However, as a general rule most decisions should be taken on the dev-list and open to a public debate. Sometimes the nature of the HISP project and requirements by customer organisations (mainly national/local health departments in the HISP network) makes it impossible to strictly follow such a democratic decision-making process. Such special cases can e.g. be priority of functionality in a release due to special needs of the HISP customers or more general design issues that relates to the overall requirements for software development in the HISP project (need to follow a minimum of requirements inherited from previous versions of the DHIS etc.).

At the moment the DHIS 2.0 leadership is organised the following way:

Project leaders from HISP:
Knut Staring
Ola Hodne Titlestad

Core developers:
Lars Helge Øverland
Abyot Asalefew
Torgeir Lorange Østby

Major decisions

This list gives an overview of the major decisions taken by HISP's DHIS 2.0 coordinator and DHIS core developers during the software development process. These issues should have been discussed on the dev-list (dhis-dev@hisp.info) before they appear here as decided and include a link to the relevant e-mail threads.

The name (2006-09-12)

The name is DHIS 2 for general use, and that each version has the name DHIS 2.0, DHIS 2.0.15, DHIS 2.1 etc.

We are developing a new version of an existing software, the DHIS. That is
the main reason to keep that name and not change it to DHIS2 or DHIS-2.

References:
Dev-list thread "How to write DHIS2?"

Releases (2006 Feb)

A new release every month on the 15th.
The releases will be tagged in the subversion repository
A ready-to-deploy .war file will be made available for download
The demo running at hisp.info will be updated on every release

References:
Dev-list thread "DHIS2 release"

GUI navigation

Periods

Data Sets

Internationalisation

As from M2 (March 15) the GUI should be i18n enabled. This requirement comes first of all from the Indian state of Jharkhand where the GUI must be presented in both English and Hindi. Also in Vietnam there is a need for i18n to be able to test and implement DHIS 2.0 there.

Internationalisation of the DAO layer (or "database", meaning data elements, indicators, groups etc.) is schedules for M4 (May 15).