History

Birth of the Cause

During the 2006 Plone Conference, Chris Johnson proposed a "Birds of a Feather" (BOF) on ecommerce in order to address the lack of tools in the area. Over twenty people came to that meeting, and when they were asked why they had come, most of them reported wanting to know "the state of the art for ecommerce in Plone". The sad situation that became apparent as we all pooled our knowledge on ecommerce was that there was no state of the art in Plone. It had been a space that had been largely ignored in the Plone community. We all agreed, however, that it wasn't an impossible challenge. Besides, with Plone, we already had amazing tools available. So we came up with an initial plan for enabling commerce in Plone sites. One of the main initial motivations was that non profit organizations had no way to collect needed funds through their (otherwise amazing) Plone site.

For a couple months, the idea lay idle. Chris began gathering background information on the Plone commerce situation to make sure we weren't reinventing the wheel (that became our Plone Commerce Background document) to justify the need for something new. Then the process to define what was needed got more explicit.

Building the Team

Clearly a developer was needed to get things done. Chris pitched the idea of making Plone work for non-profits to Kapil Thangavelu, a core developer with lots of experience in Plone and Zope. From that, the ideas of architecting the system quickly took on a new level of detail...and beauty. It became apparent that this was an ideal place to leverage the latest tools available via Zope 3, which - with Kapil's knowledge - could elegantly handle the situation. Finally, a long time supporter of this cause, Jon Stahl, was added as a liason to the non-profit community. Jon gave the project a direct line to dozens of non-profit users and got requirements gathering further advanced.

Off and Sprinting...

A perfect storm was brewing, and in March 2007, things converged to kick off the project due to a critical mass created by the TriZPUG's Zope 3 training and sprint (aka BBQSprint). In less than two weeks, we shifted from planning into kickoff mode, by recruiting some people interested in the ideas, documenting what needed to be done, and raising a bit of money to cover our costs. We had 9 people gather to provide the first work on the product (see report), which involved as much of determining an approach as to coding itself. By the end of that sprint, we were already scheduled to participate in another sprint, this time hosted at Google's campus in California. This time over a dozen people helped to tackle a new level of infrastructure, tests, and interfaces (see report).

Key to the approach of the GetPaid team was that, for such a pressing and serious need in the community, we could not rely only upon volunteer efforts that might be strung out over very long periods. We wanted to make sure this project was run professionally and involved committed work to advance it. For that reason, a first release plan was developed and used as the basis for seeking initial funds to cover development and sprint costs. Several sponsors and other contributors stepped up to make it possible to fund development activity for the first release.

Targets and Future

The first release of GetPaid is targeted at establishing a framework and serving the donation use case of non profits. During the time of organizing the project, we have gathered a community with diverse interests in other use cases. Going forward, we will continue to organize the "social source" projects for specific use cases, enabling those with specific needs to collaborate together in driving progress for additional components. You can find out more about future extensions or contact the project organizers to participate.