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

[Bradley M. Kuhn]

Marc Paré wrote on 29 August:
> 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.

Most non-profit orgs couldn't look more different from a Fortune 500
company. :) Rarely do they have time to evaluate software choices --
they pick what's cheap and works "well enough".  I've seen this with
CiviCRM: it was a classic Free Software adoption method: it's was both
free as in price and free as in freedom, and it did the basics early of
what people needed, so they just adopted it.  In the years since,
Civi has become a standard for many, many small non-profits.

> 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.

One thing that Conservancy has, and why we launched this project, is a
lot of built-up knowledge about how to handle accounting for non-profits.
I generally agree your point about avoiding autocracy, but
Lobo's point is strong as well: ultimately, Conservancy is responsible
to its donors and the project it pitched to those donors.  We have to
deliver on what we said, and we can't design by committee and meet that
target at the same time.

Most Free Software projects start (and usually continue!) as a single
developer / small team.  I'd love for this project to get to the point
of having lots of developers, and that's why I want to do as much code
reuse (and thus, join an upstream community) as possible.

But we aren't going to create an upstream community out of whole cloth
until there's some working code that *does* something useful for a few
non-profits.  This is why I don't want to ditch the evaluation phase
entirely, because we might discover an upstream community waiting for
us that we've missed.

I'll consider the first year of the project a success if, as I wrote in
the original pitch, a non-technical bookkeeper at a small non-profit can
keep the books and hand off the proper reports to the auditors.
Once we have a system that can do that, the next step will be building a
user community and those kinds of committees you mention.  As Lobo said,
it's easy for potential users to give opinions, but if it's not structured
as a bug report against some existing, working, running code, it's tough
to actually launch a project based on merely those comments/input.
-- 
Bradley M. Kuhn, Executive Director, Software Freedom Conservancy