Challenges of Open Source Software Capacity Building among DHIS2 developers in India
Ole Kristian Braun Hustad · NORA - Norwegian Open Research Archives · 2008
This master thesis is based on the author’s participation in an open source software based project named DHIS2. The project is developed for the organisation named Health Information System Program (HISP). In the project I have acted as developer within integration development with proprietary software from the Indian health sector. My main effort in this project is capacity building in key tools and frameworks of DHIS2; Subversion, Maven, Spring, Hibernate, JUnit and WebWork in the HISP India node. The HISP coordinators in Oslo wish to outsource the main development activity of DHIS2 to India, which is the main reason for the capacity building effort in India. The main goal was to empower the HISP developers in India with the necessary skills and knowledge to become the main developer node in the HISP network regarding DHIS2 development. This master thesis describes the capacity building effort in the HISP India Node during the spring 2007, with special focus on the use of best practices for development purposes. Some of the more interesting findings from the capacity building effort is how the project strive to follow and use best practices, yet in many ways fail to achieve its distributed open source software development strategy due to path dependencies inherited from local contexts in the Global HISP network.