Friday 22 November 2013

Announcing Project Mtuha

I blogged recently about a plan to produce an application based on merging +KwaMoja with Care2x, and I thought it was time to update on progress. Currently the project is called Mtuha.

We have been working on the interface, Registration, Admissions, and Billing modules, but to continue much further with the project we require some form of sponsorship to make it happen. Please let me know if you have any ideas for this.

The interface now looks like this:

The icons along the top left of the toolbar represent different security tokens that the user will have in their login. For information about the security tokens used in KwaMoja see this blog post here
 
Holding the mouse over one of these icons brings down a menu containing those options allowed for that security token.

Clicking on any of these options loads up that script in the browser.

We have created a minimal framework that enables forms to be designed, and submitted. Also all forms can be edited, and each element in a form can be made mandatory, and it's visibility can be toggled on and off. This can be used for all forms, and converting the current forms in KwaMoja and Care2x to this framework is very easy.

The registration form contains many elements, a few of which can be seen below, but any of these can be hidden, or added, made mandatory, or optional.
There is a stock type of "Registration Items", and any items set up with this category will appear as options at the bottom of the registration screen:
On completion of the registration, the above appears, and any options that user is entitled to perform are shown on the right. Clicking on print, just prints the patient detail label. Mtuha can be setup to use the bar code, so that when the bar code is scanned by a mobile device (phone etc.) you can be taken to a chosen place in Mtuha for that patient.
There is a new patient search facility, which is the same as used throughout Mtuha when a patient number needs to be found. When you start to type in any of the search fields, the list of possible patients automatically updates. At the far right of each patient details there is a small icon. Clicking that icon will bring up a list of options that the particular user can choose to perform on that patient record.

This particular user can only modify the registration details, or admit the patient. If the user was a cashier then they would see options to bill the patient.
Clicking to admit the patient takes you to the admissions form shown here.


Like the registration form it is fully customisable, and all fields can be made optional/mandatory, or be hidden/shown.


As with the registration form, there is a stock type called Admission. Any items setup with this stock type will appear at the bottom of the admissions form. You can select one or many of these billable items, just as with registration.


If the user then logs in as a cashier, and searches for a patient they are then presented with an option to bill the patient, rather than previously seeing the options to register and admit. Selecting that option brings up this screen, showing any unpaid items for that patient.


Clicking on the button prints a bill for this patient. However it also does a lot more. If any of the items are physical stock items then the required stock movements are processed, together with all related General Ledger transactions. Each cashier has a separate cash account set up for them, and processing this bill will debit that account, and credit the profit and loss account with the sale. At the end of their shift there is a report that should be run by the cashier detailing all the cash they should have received. This report is checked against the physical amount of money the cashier has, and is then passed on to the accounts department.

As I said at the beginning of this article, what we really require now is funding to hire more African developers, and pay for my time.

Wednesday 16 October 2013

Help required!!

I have had a plan bubbling away for sometime to take care2x and KwaMoja and merge them together as one complete integrated package. I have written before about how KwaMoja and Care2x have been used in African hospitals, using the KwaMoja api to communicate between the two applications. Now my idea is to create a single open sourced application with a unified interface and a single login that can be rolled out across hospitals all over the continent.

However this requires resources which as ever are in short supply. To get good African programmers who can work full time on this project requires money.

My idea to raise this is to start a Kickstarter project to generate the funding. However I need some help, as a lot of this stuff requires marketing skills that I do not possess. For instance they say a promotional video is more or less essential to a successful project, but I do not have the first idea of how to create one.

There is no money to pay for these services up front, but if someone wants to volunteer (remember that KwaMoja and Care2x have been written by volunteers down the years) I could look to recompensing them later if and when the project gets funded, as a promotional video could be useful in pushing the final software to hospitals. Obviously anybody helping would also gain a lot of publicity for their skills.

If anyone is interested in helping this in any way, then please send me an email on tim.schofield1960@gmail.com.

Thanks in advance!!

Wednesday 9 October 2013

Africa and Open Source software

Africa is the most under represented continent when it comes to contributing to open source projects, yet it stands to gain the most of any continent from it. This seems so sad to me.

Why is this so?

There is a perception with many African developers I have met that Open Source is something done by rich western volunteers, in order to benefit people like themselves. There is a tendency to mix it up with the work of Save the children fund, or Oxfam. I have heard the following said many times: "I am an African I can't afford to be a volunteer". It is viewed as a resource to be taken from, but not to give back to.

This is not to say there are no African open source developers, just far fewer than there should be given the wealth of talent on the African continent.

Why should Africans should participate fully Open Source? 

There are two very obvious reasons why individuals can gain from fully participating in open source projects

Firstly by interacting with other programmers it is possible to increase your skill set in ways that would otherwise be impossible. Many of the worlds best programmers are involved in open source projects and are happy to mentor those who are new.

Secondly by contributing to open source projects you enhance your reputation globally. Most if not all the worlds big software companies monitor open source projects looking for talented programmers. In what other way could a student at an African university bring their talents to the attention of the likes of Google or Facebook? Open source show cases your skills.

Proposal to build an African software industry

So much for how contributing to open source can help individuals progress, but what about on a country level? Every year African countries spend millions of dollars on software licenses, almost all, if not all of this money is paid to western companies and none of this money ends up in the African economy. This is despite the fact that all the software necessary is available through open source. So my proposal is this:

I will use Uganda as my example here but this applies equally to any African country.

I propose that the largest university in Uganda (Makerere University) would create a Linux Distribution, based on one of the big distributions such as Ubuntu, Debian, Suse or Fedora. This would be branded for Uganda, and include any applications specific to Uganda, together with any local language translations. This distribution would be maintained by the university and would be used as the basis for their teaching, and funded by the government with money that would otherwise have gone abroad. It would be an excellent resource for all areas that are taught in the computer science department. Creating this is not a huge task as there is a large amount of documentation on this subject to be found on the web.

The distribution would contain all the applications needed, such as LibreOffice for word processing and spreadsheets, Firefox for web browsing etc.

The government would commit to moving all their computers to this distribution. If the city of Munich in Germany can achieve this I see no reason why Kampala can't.

The contracts to support the government departments would then be handed out to local support companies, who would have been trained in the distribution at the university. Thus the money instead of going to large American multinationals would stay in Uganda and would circulate within the Ugandan economy, making a sustainable Ugandan IT industry.

Private industry would see the increase in skills with Linux, and the consequent decrease in the skill levels in other operating systems. They would start to take the pragmatic decision to move to this Linux distribution.

We have seen recently how the big American corporations have been "encouraged" to give the security services back doors into their operating systems, allowing the likes of the NSA to view what is on the computers of anybody in the world using their operating systems. This would include (in theory) any member of the Ugandan government. Using a Ugandan operating system built in Uganda, with the code open to view would stop this happening.

So there it is, a simple recipe for creating a sustainable IT industry within Africa, keeping the money in Africa, and potentially exporting IT to the rest of the world, instead of constantly leaking the money out of the Africa. All of this could be achieved with the technology available now. All it takes the will in the government to make it happen. Lets put pressure on them to start making it happen today!

Tuesday 8 October 2013

How the webERP community takes second place to Phil's vendetta

This page is written in response to the lies that +Phil Daintree has written about me, and spread on the internet. Despite years of searching he has been unable to find anything I have written that is untrue, and he has had to resort to vague generalities, faked emails, and badly fabricated screenshots (you can see the joins if you zoom in using any bit mapped image editor). +Phil Daintree is welcome to make any comments to these pages, as he has done in the past. If I agree with what he says I will amend my writings, if I do not agree I have allowed his comments to stand next to mine so that people can make their own judgements. I have every confidence in the intelligence of readers to make a sensible judgement based on the facts. +Phil Daintree  will not allow me the right of reply to any of the lies he has told about me. It seems to me significant that he realises that if people see both sides of the argument they will see through his lies.

Back at the end of July a user posted a bug report on the webERP forums (http://www.weberp.org/forum/showthread.php?tid=981). As +Phil Daintree has made it so I am not allowed to help people on the forum I sent the user the fix privately and sent it on to +Phil Daintree

I also posted the fix to the nabble forum in order that the maximum number of users got the benefit of the fix.

Unfortunately +Phil Daintree refused to commit my bug fix, being happier that the community should use buggy software than recognise that I had fixed the bug. My post to the nabble forum was also taken down by +Phil Daintree  at the same time as the post about how many bytes a particular JavaScript function used.

The same user has now upgraded and found that 4.11 has over written the fix given to him (http://www.weberp.org/forum/showthread.php?tid=1935).

Who suffers in this scenario? Not me, I have the fix. Not +Phil Daintree, or +Phil Daintree's paying customers, they too are given the fix. No the people he makes suffer are the webERP community who are denied the bug fixes I am supplying.

The project is being run to help +Phil Daintree in his vendetta against me rather than for the benefit of the community.

Come on +Phil Daintree step aside and let the community run this project!

Monday 30 September 2013

What KwaMoja is and what KwaMoja is not

This is a post about what exactly KwaMoja is, and why we are doing it, and also to explain properly what it is not.

Origins

KwaMoja has its origins in some lectures I did at a community college in Kenya. The basis of the lectures was extending the webERP software in various directions. After the lectures some of the students wanted to carry on the work. Due to the unfriendly and often abusive style of management at webERP and I suggested they speak to Munir Patel who had previously talked to me about doing an African/Indian based fork of webERP, and so KwaMoja was born.

When it became obvious that certain people were intent on destroying the project for their own selfish ends, I got involved more deeply.

Vision

Our vision at KwaMoja is to make African businesses more competitive with those in the west. In the Eighties, western businesses went through a revolution, lowering inventory costs, improving efficiencies, improving quality, and raising profits for their shareholders. Central to this revolution was the rolling out of ERP software. Very few businesses in the west do not now take advantage of ERP. We believe that KwaMoja is that ERP software for African businesses.

Free Software

KwaMoja is Free software. Now free in this sense means that KwaMoja code comes to you free of restrictions. You can do whatever you like with it, so long as you maintain those freedoms. When you buy software from Apple for instance, the software comes with many restrictions as to what you can and cannot do with it. You can only use it to do what some people in grey suits at Apple's HQ want you to do with it. Free software does not necessarily mean that you cannot charge people for the software, anybody who wants to charge for KwaMoja can do, and anybody who wishes to give it away free can also do that.

Where is the money?

KwaMoja itself has no funding. It is not a company, we have no income, and we have no employees. It is made possible by donations of time and money from those of us involved. However we are not super rich philanthropists. Far from it, and we have had to earn money elsewhere while getting the project ready for release. There is no money to pay web designers, programmers etc.

Many people and companies in the west have become wealthy by being consultants in the implementation of ERP systems. They have no financial interest in the software themselves. They merely work on the implementation side, and people like SAP get the software fees themselves. These fees are often prohibitive to African companies. Our aim at KwaMoja is to build an ecosystem so that many people can get rich on the back of the KwaMoja project. Our aim is to get as many people as possible selling consultancy services around this project.

Consultants who work for $250 a day are considered very cheap, even in African countries. The rewards can be huge.

Why would someone need consultancy?

According to research at least 65% of ERP implementations fail. Failure can often have disastrous implications for a business, whilst success can bring huge benefits to a business. Employing good experienced consultants is often the difference between success and failure. This is why western businesses will always pay for consultancy.

Why would I want to donate my time and skills?

Good question. As I have said above we are none of us rich philanthropists, and we are all seeking to make some money in the end. Imagine you are a company that is looking for consultancy support for it's implementation . Would you choose a consultant who has been actively involved in the building of the software, or someone who has done nothing for it? My guess is that those who contribute the most will earn the most as consultants. You would also gain a global audience to showcase your skills.

Is it just for Africa?

No, definitely not. This software can be used anywhere in the world.

Conclusion

So there it is, that is what KwaMoja is. Sound interesting? Then join us, there is always tons to do.

Saturday 28 September 2013

The "illegal characters" debate

This page is written in response to the lies tha +Phil Daintree has written about me, and spread on the internet. Despite years of searching he has been unable to find anything I have written that is untrue, and he has had to resort to vague generalities, faked emails, and badly fabricated screenshots (you can see the joins if you zoom in using any bit mapped image editor). +Phil Daintree  is welcome to make any comments to these pages, as he has done in the past. If I agree with what he says I will amend my writings, if I do not agree I have allowed his comments to stand next to mine so that people can make their own judgements. I have every confidence in the intelligence of readers to make a sensible judgement based on the facts. +Phil Daintree will not allow me the right of reply to any of the lies he has told about me. It seems to me significant that he realises that if people see both sides of the argument they will see through his lies..

In response to this blog post of mine, +Phil Daintree has posted this to the mailing list. I tried to post a reply to the mailing list, but it was rejected, so I publish it here in the hope it is useful to the debate:

"Phil,

It seems to me that in your attempts to control what characters the user can use you have lost sight of why you are trying to do it. The point of an ERP is to help the user do what is best for their business rather than to tell them what you think is best for their business.

For instance you have recently put a check on what characters can be used in the users company name. Why should it be up to you to decide how a user should spell their company name? What you should be doing is trying these characters in the company name, and then looking at all the places in the code where that field is used, and seeing if these characters cause a problem. I suspect they don't cause any issues, but if they do you should be trying to resolve those issues, not just banning the characters.

Likewise with item codes. The code 3.5K/V-5"x3" would be a perfectly legitimate code for a user to want to use, but would fail the new illegal character tests on several grounds. Yes a user could work around this problem, but why should they when most other ERP packages will allow it?

It seems to me that this desire of yours to control everyone and everything is pulling webERP down. Let us free the users up to do what is best for them, instead of all the time telling them what you think is best for them.

Thanks
Tim"

Thursday 26 September 2013

Setting up your computer for KwaMoja

KwaMoja is a web application. This means that the software runs on a server, and is viewed through a web browser. These need not be on different computers, it is perfectly possible to have both the server and the browser on the same machine.

For best results the browser should be a relatively recent release but as all browsers are freely available for download this should not be a problem.

The web server can be run on most operating systems released in the last decade. It should include a web server, a database server, and the PHP language.

On windows we recommend using the WampServer. This can be downloaded for free and installed with one click. This will install all of the above applications. You will find a folder called something like c:\wamp\www where you should unpack your KwaMoja code. Once the wamp server is started, just point your browser at http://localhost/KwaMoja and you should be greeted by the KwaMoja installer.

On Debian based Linux systems the packages can be installed by using the following command (https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-install-linux-apache-mysql-php-lamp-stack-on-ubuntu):

sudo apt-get install apache2 php5 mysql-server


sudo yum install httpd mysql mysql-server php php-mysql

On Apple computers you can setup a one click install using MAMP. Like with windows it will install everything in one go.

Of course as with most things there are many other ways to achieve this, (use nginx instead of apache, use mariadb instead of mysql) but the above methods will get you started with the new beta of KwaMoja.