Status on NPO Accounting project: Conservancy seeks a contractor to begin work

[Donald A. Lobo]

my 2 cents and some advice based on past experience with civicrm and other products:

a. Avoid going down the route of design by committee / design by mailing list. Things get talked about a lot with little forward progress

b. Based on some of your prior emails, i'm assuming there are quite a few open source packages out there. I dont think the project should attempt to evaluate all of them. Pick the top three to five based on some metrics, your past experience, their current track record, community etc and go with it. The project does not have enough time / money to spend all of it on evaluation.

c. Since you (and some other orgs) are already fairly happy with ledger-cli, i'm not sure how important and how much time u'll should spend on the evaluation phase

d. In our past experience, trying to convince folks who have a closed source system / have chosen not to open source their code has been a big time sink

e. Your most important audience are other foundations who want to use the end product and folks who are investing a fair bit of time on the work. Its great to get comments and feedback from the broader community, but take that with a grain of salt (since commenting is relatively cheap). In the civi world, we have lots of folks who want us to do lots of things. Most of the times, these things are not as important when those folks are asked to contribute / sponsor / do the work.

lobo



>> Perhaps so -- although, is there any reason to believe their code base
>>> is miles above the many other codebases out there of this type?  I'm
>>> reluctant to burn time trying to get a codebase liberated that isn't
>>> uniquely suited.
>> Yeah, we already tried that once, which is why this accounting software
>> wasn't written 3 years ago ...
>>
>> (for those not in the know, I was working on a funded project to do this
>> software in 2009, but our main funder got sidetracked by the goal of
>> "liberating" some proprietary NPO accounting software, and I had to move
>> on to other things)
>>
>From what I have seen and experience in my particular case, I could not 
>imagine any NPO accounting software owner would be willing to part with 
>proprietary code. Fund accounting looks like quite a lucrative industry 
>that is really driven by software and very little by service. The 
>approach of going with some already open sourced code from a solid 
>accounting package, to me, would seem to be the more common sense 
>approach. I can only see a lot of "push-back" from the fund accounting 
>proprietary owners at the prospect of having a new player on the block 
>with an open sourced fund accounting package.
>
>If you were working on the project, what happened to the code? or were 
>you just at the planning stage without any starter code?
>
>Cheers,
>
>Marc
>
>-- 
>Marc Paré
>Marc at MarcPare.com
>http://www.parEntreprise.com
>parEntreprise.com Supports OpenDocument Formats (ODF)
>parEntreprise.com Supports http://www.LibreOffice.org
>
>_______________________________________________
>npo-accounting mailing list
>npo-accounting at sfconservancy.org
>http://lists.sfconservancy.org/mailman/listinfo/npo-accounting
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.sfconservancy.org/pipermail/npo-accounting/attachments/20130828/31824971/attachment-0001.html>