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

[Bradley M. Kuhn]

Donald Lobo wrote on 28 August:
> 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.

This is a good piece of advice, and we'll definitely take it (or some
version of it).  I really didn't expect when we started there were so
many codebases, which is why I expected the Phase 0 evaluation could
be done in a few weeks.

My current plan is to spend a day or two doing an "eval-sprint", where
we can all get together on an IRC channel (once Conservancy has hired
someone) and work through the list quickly, eliminating ones that have
no hope, to get down quickly to that list of 3-5.

We should probably put some time into writing up use-cases first, of
course.
 

> 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

I think it's still worth it to put some time into evaluation.  Ledger
CLI has its quirks that may make UI difficult.  I am actually holding
out some hope for a hybrid solution: perhaps there's some accounting UI
that looks pretty good that perhaps could be reused with Ledger CLI on
the backend.  That'd create quite a multi-headed beast, so this may not
be doable, but I want to be creative about our code reuse.

> 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

Agreed.

> 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.

Indeed.  This is why I'd really like to get one other org to "co-deploy"
with us.  I was hoping it might be SPI, but GNOME Foundation might also
be willing.  Ideally, as we develop, it'd be nice to have two orgs
trying to use the system so we can find what's missing quickly.

-- 
Bradley M. Kuhn, Executive Director, Software Freedom Conservancy