Revitalization of npoacct project; Brett Smith will take over as project lead

[Brett Smith]

On 08/25/2016 12:32 PM, Bradley M. Kuhn wrote:

> Conservancy  however had some success in our general fundraising such
> that Conservancy hired an additional full-time staffer, Brett Smith, who
> joined this week: https://sfconservancy.org/news/2016/aug/22/brett-joins/
>
> Brett has extensive software development, design, and software team
> leadership experience.  His experience in these areas is much more
> current than mine, and so after discussions with Brett, I have decided
> that it makes the most sense to hand over leadership of this project
> directly to Brett.  Brett will spend 50% of his Conservancy work time on
> this project.

Hi everyone,

Nice to meet you all. A bit more about me: I’m coming to Conservancy
from Curoverse, where I helped develop Arvados
<https://dev.arvados.org/>, an AGPLed big data analysis platform focused
on bioinformatics. Arvados consists of several components, responsible
for individual tasks such as data storage, compute dispatch, and Web
interface.

One reason I bring this up is because that structure helped inspire this
move, to start by building a system for filing reimbursement requests.
Ideally, a system to file reimbursement requests will eventually
integrate with all the different bookkeeping systems that people use. We
can start out with simple functionality like “Export to .format,” and
over time we can make those integrations more user-friendly, and add new
ones. This lets us solve a problem organizations have today, relatively
quickly; and as we continue work on the rest of the NPO Accounting
project, building the core accounting system, the reimbursement handler
can still work with that no matter how it shakes out. And we can
similarly build components to handle other specific tasks around accounting.

In other words, part of the motivation for this approach is to try to
avoid reinventing the wheel. If there are FLOSS systems for receiving
reimbursement requests that people know about, definitely please do
share; I’d much rather build from what exists than start from scratch.
Unfortunately nothing’s been mentioned in the initial conversations I’ve
had with organization leaders this week.

> So, we're moving again!  I expect the #npoacct channel on freenode and
> this list to become active in the next few days with plenty of
> discussion on this initiative.

This is definitely right. I’ve written plenty of code in public and I
want to keep doing that, even before it’s necessarily functional. Right
now I’m still considering what frameworks and/or libraries we might use
to help build this faster, and I’ll post about that when I’ve got some
useful comparisons. I’m happy to hear thoughts you have about that too.
Once the coding gets underway, I look forward to the technical
discussions on #npoacct too.

Best regards,

​
-- 
Brett Smith
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