FYI OpenPetra.org

[Timotheus Pokorra]

Hello Marc,

Thank you for bringing up OpenPetra again!

During the evaluation, OpenPetra was considered:
http://npoacct.sfconservancy.org/ExistingProjects/OpenPetra/

Since the evaluation, some things have changed:
We have split the project, in a friendly fork [1].
This means the guys at OM (Operation Mobilisation) can focus on
getting the version ready for production inhouse. They plan to rollout
OpenPetra into production for the first office within the next 3
months. They are currently about 7 developers working on it.
The good thing is, we have an agreement that I as representative of
the Open Source fork have access to their internal code repository and
usually once a month pick the code that is of interest to the general
public and import it into the open source fork. On the Open Source
Fork side, we can move faster and integrate technical improvements
without so much discussion.

Some improvements:
We use now Github, rather than Bazaar/Launchpad. Makes life so much easier. [2]
The communication between server and client has been replaced, not
using .Net remoting anymore which has been deprecated even by
Microsoft, but using standard http/https web services. This improves
debugging and again makes life so much easier.

I understand that the Linux client is a requirement for the Software
Freedom Conservancy, and I do see the need as well.
I worked on an alternative web client in the beginning of 2014. You
can try a demo at [3].
It is currently only a proof of concept.
This work could be picked up and continued. Long-term, I think it is
worth investing into a HTML/JS client rather than a fat client, which
has to be supported on Linux, Windows, and OSX.

In the past months, my focus has been on working on a Beta release of
OpenPetra with the fat client, since the work on the browser client
would still take a huge effort.
I also worked on getting recent versions of Mono into Fedora with the
long-term goal CentOS [4].
Other people are working to fix Winform bugs for Mono, as I see in the
Mono pull requests at Github.
So we could make an effort to improve the OpenPetra Linux client
running with Mono winforms.

We have now a forum based on Discourse at [5].
Unfortunately, in the past months I was not able to invest more time
to build a community for OpenPetra.
I see the immediate need to work towards a Beta of OpenPetra, and
documenting what works and how it can be used to manage a small
charity at first.
My plan is to write tutorials for users and developers and produce
some screencasts.

Indeed, the OpenPetra project could need some more help :)

Hope this helps to clarify things,
  Timotheus

[1] https://www.openpetra.org/update-december-2014-work-of-past-months-and-friendly-fork
[2] https://github.com/openpetra/openpetra
[3] https://demo.solidcharity.com
[4] https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/mono/2015-April/thread.html
[5] https://forum.openpetra.org/

On 7 May 2015 at 22:18, Marc Paré <marc at marcpare.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I just thought I would send you this information of another opensource fund
> accounting project that has already been started. It is called the
> "OpenPetra Project" and is licensed under the GPL licence.
>
> I wonder, seeing as our present endeavour has pretty well slowed to a crawl,
> would it be in our interest to take a look at the OpenPetra project  and add
> our efforts to that project, or even adopt a fork of that project? It looks
> like the closed sourced version "Petra" is already being used by a group
> called "Open Mobilisation" and in over 80 countries.
>
> At this point, the OpenPetra Project is still in alpha stage and it looks
> like it would need a little help to get it to the level that we would most
> likely need for what we would consider a proper "Fund Accounting" software
> package.
>
> Would this be a possible new direction that we could explore?
>
> Also FYI, I am not a dev, so I would not be able to gauge as to how much
> work would be involved to help more the OpenPetra project to a more stable
> Fund Accounting level of software. But, to me, the project looks promising.
> The code is there and already at an advanced stage, the user GUI looks also
> quite good.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Marc