Status on NPO Accounting project: Conservancy seeks a contractor to begin work
Marc Paré
marc at marcpare.com
Thu Aug 29 00:16:56 EDT 2013
Yeh, but, just imagine that had there not been this prior exchange on
this mailing list there would not have been at least some glimpse of
some people's expectation of the end product. As for evaluation, not
sure if your assertion would work in a "real world" environment with a
fortune 500 company. I couldn't imagine a project manager telling his
superior that she/he only looked at the top 3-5 picks and went with one
of them ... ??? To make a good solid judgement call, you should take a
close look at what is out there and then short list, ahem, with a
committee of trusted contributors/stakeholders ... otherwise, autocracy
will most likely not get you far with collaborators. Sure, somewhere, a
decision must be made, but you have to listen to the voices you are
hoping to invite on-board.
Closed source contribution to open source is normally made up of human
connections to the devs/project managers. All it takes is a couple of
emails and the answer will be pretty straight forward ... yes-no. Have a
look/try the software first, does not take long to do this, and then ask
the devs who had a record of being supportive of the open source
community. I can approach the Quasar devs if this makes a difference. At
least it would either introduce another solid codebase to start from if
they agreed to collaborate/cooperate. Perhaps even having to audit the
code would be a deal breaker, who knows.
Yup comments can be cheap, or we could ignore those we don't agree with
and then end up with a silent mailing list. If you want to build
community, you have to promote community involvement. The project will
need testers/QA for alpha/betas and not just dev work; same with a docs
team.
I imagine that perhaps a few possible choices could be summed up, with a
dev doing a cursory look at the code to see if it is clean enough to
work with. It would be shame to go with an initial codebase that already
needed major cleanup.
Cheers,
Marc
Le 2013-08-28 21:09, Donald A. Lobo a écrit :
>
>
> 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 <mailto:Marc at MarcPare.com>
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Marc Paré
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