2026-10-24 –, Room 250
OpenHospital is a free and open-source health information management system used in hospitals across Uganda, Ethiopia, and other resource-limited regions. Built by Informatici Senza Frontiere, it manages patient records, laboratory results, pharmacy stock, and statistical reporting for healthcare workers and patients who depend on it daily.
As a team of four undergraduate students contributing to OpenHospital for the first time, we each tackled separate “good first issues” across reporting infrastructure, interface consistency, localization cleanup, and GUI data accessibility. This talk shares what we worked on and what we learned contributing to production healthcare software as first-time open source contributors.
This proposal is from a team of four undergraduate students at the University of Washington Bothell contributing to OpenHospital as part of a university open source software course taught by Dr. Kaylea Champion.
Each team member independently worked on a separate Jira issue over a four-week period. Our issues were all labeled “good-first-issue” and ranged from GUI usability improvements (OP-278), to codebase cleanup (OP-1383), to refactoring (OP-1024), to exploring structural improvements to the report localization system (OP-214).
We envision this as a short 20 minute talk with four team members presenting in person, each covering our own components paired with a shared introduction and reflection section. We think our experience is valuable both to first-time contributors and to maintainers interested in understanding the onboarding experience from a student perspective, including what felt confusing, what helped, and how large open source projects can feel more approachable to new contributors.
Abhigna is a junior at the University of Washington Bothell pursuing Computer Science and Data Science. She is passionate about developing software for real-world impact, and is currently researching cybersecurity risks that generative AI poses to open source software with Dr. Kaylea Champion. Her interests span IP law, generative AI, and user-centered applications. She enjoys teaching coding and exploring the broader implications of AI on technology - from its impact on CVE databases to how it can support developers without compromising software quality and integrity.
