NPO Accounting Project planning update

[Bradley M. Kuhn]

I know this list has been quiet for a while again, and you hopefully you
all saw the announcement on Conservancy's website about a month ago:
     http://sfconservancy.org/news/2014/mar/31/karen-joins/


For the next month or two, I'll need to continue my work transitioning
out of the role of Executive Director and handing it off fully to Karen.
Once that's done, Conservancy's Board of Directors have agreed and
encouraged me to spend up to 50% of my work time at Conservancy on this
project.  That is not occurring yet due our role transition, but it's
the plan and I expect it to begin RSN.

Meanwhile, Joar Wandborg, whom you all probably know was on short-term
contract for a while with Conservancy to work on this project, decided
to leave some of his remaining billable hours aside (which we'll
probably take advantage of later) and has taken a different full-time
job.  Joar did excellent work helping me evaluate the various Free
Software codebases and writing the API prototype.  He helped me
bootstrap the project, set up our infrastructure, and I'm very grateful
for his efforts.


Looking forward, I've decided to focus the next phase of this project on
improving that API that Joar started.  My initial goal will be to use
the existing Conservancy Ledger-CLI data as a testbed to build an API
that uses Ledger-CLI on the backend (with the hope that others will
assist with other back-ends).

Meanwhile, my plan is to build a basic reporting system using this API
to verify its effectiveness and usefulness, and to begin the reporting
module part of the NPO Accounting application.

I've chosen to approach the task this way because this is the easiest
way to leverage the existing Conservancy data and the limited funds we
were able to raise to make some real progress.  Long term, I'd like to
raise more funds and have an additional person work with me on this
project -- likely focusing on UI design for an application that uses our
API.  However, the funds we have now are limited (we never did reach our
initial fundraising target) and channeling them in the direction of
something that leverages the work Conservancy had already done
previously seems the most efficient way to proceed.


Finally, since the next phase of this project will collaborate regularly
with Ledger CLI, there will probably be some cross-posted threads
between the two mailing lists -- I'm about to start one right now. ;)
Folks who want to participate in the discussion should feel free to just
post on this list; I'll make sure the points made "stay in sync" since
I'll be on both lists.  But you should feel free to crosspost if it
feels right to you. :)
-- 
Bradley M. Kuhn, President, Software Freedom Conservancy