social sourcing

The Symposium in New Orleans was a hotbed of GetPaid collaboration. We jump started a collaborative design process for integration PloneFormGen with GetPaid based on the nifty Salesforce.com adapter for PFG. Now, a week after we left New Orleans, already work is rapidly evolving:

• SteveM added a new feature to PFG (so action adapters can fail) and the code is tested and ready to release - thanks SteveM!!
• DanielHolth and perrito666 have been furiously hacking away and sharing code in a mercurial repository.
  
• Daniel's update today:
  perrito666 and I have been developing this at a rapid pace. So far we
  have something that's addable to the form and does a little bit of
  work. My end adds 0 of all the products in a given folder into the
  cart, and then the user might update their cart to select how many of
  each they want.
• Last I saw, perrito666 was working on pre-populating the PFG folder with the required GetPaid forms.
  

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).

What a busy month! I think I have missed about 150 revisions since the last update, so here goes an attempt to catch up...to get the latest, grab our buildout (see documentation here).

Some stats:

• Over 500 downloads of our last stable release!
• A good number of tests going into new products!
• There are now LOTS of open issues (68, actually) in the tracker, which includes lots of change/improvement requests also. If you want to help out please take 'em on!
  

Highlights of what is in the latest code now:

• UPS shipping support. Still don't quite understand it (some configuration magic that has to happen), but there has been a LOT of work to get this going. Thanks to Kapil, Liam, Perrito and others for working, reworking, and fixing this.
  
• Shipping setup: this got refactored to be a bit cleaner and have some nice viewlets. Makes it easy to add in multiple shipping methods as we grow.
  
• Inventory management: Yes!!! getpaid.warehouse now available. This is a rather recent addition (you can only find it now by adding @@inventory to the URL), but it is there! Checkouts change the quantity, there is the ability to add warehouses for a site. More goodies to come as the work is rounded out by Kapil. Nicely done!
• Address book: Thanks to a use case we had for an ifPeople client, we built a means of saving shipping addresses in your profile during checkout, which are then accessible in checkout.
  
• Auto-loading your details: get tired of typing same details into the screen? Now they get autoloaded! Go lazy programmers!!
• Order templates: reordering your viagra supply ever couple months? Now you can save time in checkout by loading your orders from your past orders!
• Shipping price wired into total price: Now when you select shipping service, it will be added to the total price in the cart/checkout. 
• SSL: Now, by default, the site wants SSL. If you are just testing, you need to deactivate this in the GetPaid setup area for checkout to work. 
• Checkout wizard refactoring: after a significant refactoring, it got some fixes and improvements and additional testing.
  
• Relational database: there is also a relational database implementation of getpaid.core (called getpaid.rdb).
  

• PayPal processor interface!!! No really...I am serious! daMaestro told me in #getpaid just now :)
• PXPay processor: The Kiwis finally have their chance at GetPaid too! Apparently Winterhouse Consulting has done an implementation of this pay processor from Payment Express.
  
• Authorize.net recurring payments: ifPeople has also done integration with of the Automatic Recurring Billing (ARB) service of authorize.net. Currently in a branch...
• A new release: no details...but probably will be associated with a shipping wrap up. Possibly in late April.
  
• More sites using GetPaid!

Now in the code:

• UK processor: As I was reminded today, Google Checkout supports UK and US merchants, so enjoy blokes!
• Printing: Emanuel checked in integration of "print" options a la Plone for the interfaces for orders, order details, and order confirmation!
  

In the works:

• Checkout refactoring: Kapil is experimenting with a new way to make the checkout screens very flexible!
• Multiple currency management: Very early planning stages for managing multiple currencies in GetPaid! Look for user stories for review coming soon.
  
• Address book management: Want to be able to ship to multiple people? You will be able to save your addresses in an address book and use them on checkout.
  
• Discounts: still looking for some help to get this incorporated properly. Got eggs?
  

Desired features looking for developers:

• Payment processors:
  
• PayPal
• usaePay
• PloneFormGen adapter: imagine making flexible forms that tie into GetPaid seemlessly! 
• UI integrators: the address book work is done in the backend but needs some integration work for UI, including javascript/ajax goodness.
  

Red Ochre release, now days away, is aimed at establishing a framework, and in the process, providing basic donation functionality. The framework part was heavy for this release...so lots of improvements have been suggested. One strong contingent for new features and improvements is from users who want to use GetPaid for online stories.

Liam has taken the initiative to draft an initial set of requirements and proposals for store features. I filled it in with a lot of the improvements suggested by users via the issue tracker as well as some additional ideas and features.

Now we need your help again - can you help us refine and define the features to make GetPaid's store use case as strong as possible? We hope that you will help us prioritize the ideas and turn them into a detailed picture of how GetPaid will work as a store. Please check out http://code.google.com/p/getpaid/wiki/Store_Functionality_Proposals , where you can add comments, or discuss the proposals on our mailing list.

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).

Chris Johnson will give his presentation on "Social Sourcing and the Story of GetPaid". The talk will talk about the process by which the project was organized (and how money was raised for a free software project) and what that process could mean for guiding the future of Plone's development in a way that integrates developers with the broader community.

See the Atlanta Plone event page for more info.