New home for NHS Numbers library / change GitHub Organisation name? following the demise of the FCI

[pacharanero]

During last summer, when we were polishing and publishing this library, the FCI (Faculty of Clinical Informatics) was a going concern, hence we set this library up under their GitHub organisation - however since then the FCI has undergone a Total Existence Failure, after a series of internal constitutional and financial dèbacles link

Some of its functions are being folded into a specialist group of the British Computer Society link, but it's by no means certain that this new group will be considered as the default 'successor' of the FCI.

A different group of people have gone ahead and set up UK Digital Health and Care (UKDHC) which again, is embryonic and not necessarily something we can rely on at this stage.

I am not sure that any of the above options are what we need for nhs-numbers and would be open to suggestions from the team/community.

We have ownership and control over this GitHub org (uk-fci) and it would be quite simple to rename the org, once we know what we want to call it.

Perhaps we could rename it to something that suggests we have aspirations to provide other open source NHS related stuff? There is plenty of scope. Alternatively the repo could be taken over by the RCPCH, which is an established open source player in the NHS, is mostly a Python shop, and is where I work so I can ensure the repo is maintained..

[pacharanero]

One option here could be to transfer the ownership of the repo into the NHS Pycom community, but we remain as maintainers?
According to NHS Pycom website they share the same sort of aims: https://nhs-pycom.net/

@craig-shenton would this be of interest?

[pacharanero]

Nearly a year on - here's an update about the FCI. It closed down fully and has now disappeared entirely. Several other organisations (UKDHC, BCS Health, FedIP) do offer some of the functions of the FCI but none have really become the clear 'leader'.

I am still working with the RCPCH regularly and we use the NHS Number library internally so we have some skin in the game maintaining this library. Current Lead Developer at RCPCH @mbarton is happy to 'adopt' this repo under the RCPCH GitHub org as long as the existing contributors are happy with that arrangement?

We would continue to maintain in the same fully open and collaborative way under the auspices of the RCPCH.
@andylaw @anchit-chandran @eatyourpeas @Cotswoldsmaker @mattstibbs @sellorm @Iain-S

[pacharanero]

Another option would be to rename this GitHub organisation and perhaps use it as a place to house generic, non-organisation-linked, tools, standards, and resources for heatlhcare software development?

[andylaw]

Unless someone is threatening to sue us for mis-use of the uk-fci name, I see no reason to move it or rename it or anything. It will still be the same people doing the same things. Why would we move it to somewhere unknown?

[pacharanero]

I've had an email from PyPI about the verification of the uk-fci Organisation on PyPI. I think it did say that the time that they were - for the time being - allowing registration of organisations without direct verification of ownership of the organisation, but that it was on the roadmap to put in measures to revent this (to prevent malicious actors registering an organisation that seems trustworthy but isn't and could form part of a supply chain attack). I had started but not completed the registration of the uk-fci Organisation.

Importantly, this PyPI Organisation is NOT where the nhs-number library is currently published from, it is published from andylaw. I'm happy to leave it where it is.

I have told PyPI that we no longer require it and it can be closed down. The nhs-numbers library will be unaffected. Note that the FCI's website is still actually running, which is odd because nobody can be paying the bills for it! The fci.org.uk domain is still registered and so we can't register it (even if that were something we wanted to do).

[pacharanero]

Why would we move it to somewhere unknown?

The website/documentation now needs to move from the custom domain I purchased (uk-fci.tech) as I don't think I am up for paying £60 a year for a domain relating to a dead organisation. I've just had a renewal email through and I'm not renewing it.

A simple option for now would be to switch back to the default GitHub Pages site which comes with our GH Organisation: it would be something like https://uk-fci.github.io/nhs-number If we update the docs URL in the package info, the docs link on GH etc then it shouldn't be too hard to find.

[andylaw]

I'm losing the mental picture of all this just now, primarily because I'm overloaded with so many other things. This is the canonical version of the code, no? Or is it my version under andylaw? And remind me how any updates land on PyPi again.

[pacharanero]

Sorry @andylaw for any confusion. I admit it looks a bit all over the place now I come to look at it myself.

Source Code: The canonical version of the code is here in this repository https://github.com/uk-fci/nhs-number which is under the now-defunct uk-fci organisation. Ideally I think we should move the repo under an org that is still alive, or a personal account of someone who is going to remain with the project, or a new org just for this kind of stuff. No rush to do this though.

PyPI Publication: New versions of code that we release to the main branch of this repository are pushed to PyPI automatically using a GitHub Action where we currently use the andylaw account/organisation. (Another GitHub Action pushes staging branch changes to the 'Testing PyPI' version of the site). We were in the process of creating the PyPI organisation for the FCI but clearly there's no point doing that now.

Library: The library/package itself is https://pypi.org/project/nhs-number/, and users include it in their downstream software by the name nhs-number. Changes to the source code repo or the PyPI maintainer won't break anybody's requirements.txt AFAICT.

Documentation Site: There is a documentation site which was being built from mkdocs.yml in the repository root and the contents of docs in the repo, using a Python docs framework called Material for MkDocs and a service called Netlify was publishing this as a static site at the custom subdomain https://nhs-number.uk-fci.tech/. This is the site that will need to move because I'm no longer going to pay for the custom domain. I propose a quick and free solution to this is to use GitHub Pages to publish it which will result in it being found at a URL like https://uk-fci.github.io/nhs-number, which I think seems reasonable to do.

Any thoughts from the other people who were involved in the project are welcome.