Editor’s Note: Starting in 2013, we will be highlighting an OpenMRS contributor every month, giving you the opportunity to learn more about the people building the OpenMRS software and community. More information about the Contributor of the Month program is available on the OpenMRS wiki...Saptarshi Purkayastha is from Mumbai, India and currently lives in Norway for work. He is a Research Fellow at the Department of Computer & Information Science, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, where he is enrolled in the PhD program and works as a researcher in the domain of Health Information Systems for developing countries. His research group is the HISP Project at the University of Oslo, so Saptarshi spends most of his time there. Recently, OpenMRS community manager Michael Downey spoke to Saptarshi about his experiences in the OpenMRS project. 
Most public health information technology projects rely on strong collaboration to be successful, especially across vendor-client boundaries. Here are some successful strategies: Clear vision. A concise and clear vision focused on public health outcomes is embraced and articulated by all participants in the project; Strong support and leadership from senior management. Without strong support from senior management, projects are rarely given the priority to enable success. This prioritization includes both agency and vendor commitment.
Opensource.com has surveyed the landscape of popular open source project management tools. We've done this before—but this time we've added a twist. This time, we're looking specifically at tools that support agile methodology, including related practices such as Scrum, Lean, and Kanban. The growth of interest in and use of agile is why we've decided to focus on these types of tools this year. A majority of organizations say they are using agile approaches at least sometimes. In addition, agile projects are 28% more successful than projects managed with traditional approaches. For this roundup, we looked at the project management tools we covered in 2014, 2015, and 2016 and plucked the ones that support agile, then did research to uncover any additions or changes. Whether your organization is already using agile or is one of the many planning to adopt agile approaches, one of these seven open source project management tools, in no particular order, may be exactly what you're looking for.