Re: [sahana-discuss] Hello & random presumptuous thoughts

[Fran B. <fra...@gm...>]

On 12 November 2014 17:50,  <sa...@br...> wrote:
> Perhaps AidIQ would be interested in helping develop a SAAS model? Are they
> on this list?

That would be Dominic & myself ;)

>> A public free service is of course a question of funding - there is though
>> currently no support for that from the Sahana Software Foundation nor any
>> other sponsor.
> First five users free?  NGO's pay a fee per month for each
> user above five?
> Maybe a Freemium model could work?

AidIQ don't have the resources to fund the setup costs here.
We'd happily subcontract work from someone who does though ;)

In general I'm not that up for spending time coding license
restrictions...would rather work on usable deliverables....however I'm
open to doing so if I believe that actually we end up having more
impact this way.

Also I'm not too happy with a per-seat model...one of the key
advantages to Sahana currently is that it doesn't have such a
restriction....although of course the downside is some technical
skills required to get operational...although this is mostly the
customisation, which includes gathering requirements, rather than
actual install.
Amazon free tier is easy to install on (try it:
http://eden.sahanafoundation.org/wiki/InstallationGuidelines/Amazon) &
that can take you to a proof of concept stage.
However the next step is normally to create your own customised
Template and that suddenly increases the skills requirement...a
sysadmin used to editing text files could manage a basic one (no need
to really get into 'code') but it's certainly not an end-user thing.
We would liek to improve this so that end-users can do a lot through a
setup wizard...this is, for me at least, a key element of what 1.0
means.
Of course there are also other customisabilities we'd like to do
within the system, e.g. having users be able to create their own
Dashboards...

>> Sahana can do single- or multi-tenancy, there's basically no limit in
>> numbers of user organizations.
> Sounds good for the Freemium model.

The restrictions AidIQ would have for setting up such a service is the
need to setup an Accounts team to manage payments, etc...as well as
the initial investment in raw hosting, template development (inc
defining the requirements for this service) & then Marketing.
I'd see us more as a Technical Partner of a an Org which wanted to
manage all that Business side...

> Perhaps the World food program Tech and Logistics clusters might be the
> first paying clients for the global Freemium deployment? Has anyone had any
> contact with them?

I suspect that if either of them engage then they'd want their own
system rather than joining a global system...they'll want their own
requirements first & foremost & not be constrained by having to
co-exist with others....and they have the resources to do this.
I will be showing Sahana off to both ETC & wider LogsCluster in CAR,
but I don't see this as Freemium business development....it's either
Free/Open or their own system which they can make parts of Private as
they wish.

> Perhaps the Sahana foundation might even be interested in
> applying as a partner?
> "Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) work together with the Emergency
> Telecommunications Cluster (ETC), through the World Food Programme (WFP),
> enabling timely, predictable, and effective Information Technology and
> Telecommunications services to be supplied to humanitarian operations in
> emergencies."Th e following NGOs are WFP partners:
> http://ictemergency.wfp.org/en/web/ictepr/ngos;jsessionid=626D8C29E3A5FECA5F8B6AE3DE232F17#NetHope
> See also the Logistics cluster:
> http://www.logcluster.org/logistics-cluster

I'll leave that to Michael ;)

I think that might be much easier if they could see something concrete
which grabs their attention...which is what I'm hoping to do in CAR.

F