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

[Josh Berkus]

Bradley,

> 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.

I think the "elimination round" is something which the volunteer
community members on this list could help with.

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

Yes, definitely.  Without the use-cases, how do we evaluate?

> 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.

Yeah, and I won't hide my bias towards using a relational database.
While I like Ledger's simplicity (we're using it for PGCAC), I can also
see outgrowing its reporting capabilities quite quickly, and I currently
can't imagine how we could implement a system with different classes of
users with different permissions on top of Ledger-CLI.  Maybe I lack
imagination ;-)

> 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.

I think SPI is quite likely to be an early adopter.  We are working with
an outside bookkeeper now, though, so the new software will need to get
to a fairly high level of usability before we can use it in earnest.

-- 
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
http://pgexperts.com