conference

For those joining the Plone Symposium in New Orleans this week, I will be giving a talk on "Social Sourcing" tomorrow (Wed) at 3pm.

Social sourcing is the participative organizing model with an entrepreneurial backbone, an established role for non-developers, and an ongoing process to make open source software projects sustainable that we used to organize the GetPaid project. Check out the notes and video from the social sourcing talk in Naples. This talk should include some updates (including from the questions in Naples and taking into account the Plone Strategic Planning Summit).

Thanks to Maurits for summarizing the talk on his blog here.

To download the presentation by John Lenton, please click here.

Social Sourcing Talk

The GetPaid project was organized differently than your average free software project. For one, we raised money for it. Additionally, we had an integrated design process that involved non-developers from the beginning. In the talk, I introduce the social sourcing model we used and why this was an important process for making the best product possible. I explained the process by telling the GetPaid story.  *New* Watch the video at plone.tv

Basic outline of the process:

Definition: An organizing approach that gets diverse stakeholders to participate to the software making process.

Outline of Social Sourcing, v1.0 Alpha ;)

• Study the market (benchmark)
• Put together a compelling plan
• Recruit the right people
• Engage a wide base in refining requirements
• Ask for money
• Celebrate successes
• Sustain it: fun, organization, motivation
• Regroup, review, and restart...

It's exciting to be moving towards the end of this process in GetPaid. After the conference, we go into a Release Candidate sprint...but we are definitely eyeing the review, regroup, and restart step!

You can get the full presentation here

The presentation was recorded and should be available at plone.org within about a month. Note also though that some sessions are being streamed live at http://ploneconf.comlounge.tv/
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Questions for Plone

Part of my presentation was to ask questions about the processes for organizing and desiging Plone, in light of the social sourcing model. In particular, how can Plone be more inclusive to non-developers in defining it's directions and features? Perhaps Plone could benefit from process improvements that would:

• Clarify direction and identity
• Provide more inclusive design process
• Improve the overall product
• Strengthen Plone community
  

In particular: how is the vision for the future defined? Is that a transparent and open process? Where is it documented? Also, why is there nothing between the vision and a PLIP that would enable non-developers to participate? (This last one came out of my frustration at not being able to create a PLIP to introduce some search UI improvements we had made to Plone core, since, as per policy on plone.org, only core developers can make PLIPs).

Just as I was getting into this, "someone who knows" informed us of imminent announcements that will address this issue. I suppose that means that at the Plone Foundation meeting tonight! So look for some more news :)

Questions for GetPaid

Jon Stahl, our NGO liason and ongoing project supporter, made a great question: what does GetPaid need to keep the process going? Not something I had prepared for, so I made a few notes here in addition to what I responded:

• Deployments! We need more deployments, and in particular, practical applications of GetPaid that lead to more options being available in the product (ie for payment processors, workflows, configurations, interfaces, etc).
• More organizers! The project is likely to have teams oriented around specific extensions to the product (membership, event registration, advanced store functionality). The organizers would basically focus on new rounds of social sourced development.
• More committed developers! Though for the first release, we relied on Kapil's work establishing GetPaid as a framework. Going forward, we need more people involved as developers to architecture as well as features.
• UI love! Usability on the system can be greatly improved and we welcome contributions to this.
• Screencasts!...for documentation and marketing.
• Organizing new round of features: questions from the audience helped get my brain off the narrow focus on getting a release to see the next round of features that need to be considered. I will be writing up some notes on this work.

Well, that's a good first start, I think, but will definitely continue to consider what we need (especially after we get to reflect on a release).

Kapil Thangavelu, lead architect of GetPaid and cofounder of ObjectRealms, will give a talk entitled "GetPaid - Making Money with Plone". The talk will provide developers a glimpse of how Zope 3 was used to create the GetPaid product and how it can be used and extended to create custom commerce solutions in Plone.

Chris Johnson, organizer of GetPaid and cofounder of ifPeople, will give a talk entitled "The story of GetPaid and a 'social source' process to create new opportunities with Plone". This talk builds on a talk delivered at the Regional Free Software Conference in Cordoba, Argentina that outlines how the project was organized using an entrepreneurial, participative model.

We are glad that the conference organizers chose GetPaid as a product to spread within the Plone community at the upcoming conference!

Find more on the conference

See the complete list of talks.