[Openpetraorg-weekly] First Update in 2011 looking back over the past 3 months and current projects

[Timotheus P. <tim...@po...>]

The new year 2011 has already progressed quite a bit, and it is time
to establish good routines again.
Some of you have missed the weekly updates, and I want to thank you
who have asked for regular updates.
A lot of things have happened since the last update, which was more
than 3 months ago, at the end of September 2010.
I will write a short summary later in this update.

The problem is that while busily working away, we forget to take time
to write down what has happened, and what the goals are.
For this year, which seems to be the year when the OpenPetra project
becomes really busy, we want to keep everyone up-to-date.
It might not be always a structured text, but even an informal update
can help to keep people motivated and to share the vision.
We might take writing the updates in turns, so one time you get the
update written by the developers in Germany, the other time from the
guys in Carlisle.

A short, not complete summary of things that have happened in the past 3 months:

In the middle of October, the 4 developers of SolidCharity.com,
Matthias, Thias, Wolfgang and Timotheus, have had their first
real-life meeting in Mosbach, Germany.
Since then we have established a weekly phone conference call between
us, and have all got into programming with C# and got used more or
less to the tools.

Christian has visited in October 2010 the Free Software and Open
Source Symposium at Seneca College, Toronto.
You can find his slides and the recording of his session here,
unfortunately the sound quality is quite poorly, there was a problem
with the recording equipment:
http://www.fosslc.org/drupal/content/openpetra-free-and-easy-use-administration-software-package-non-profit-organisations
Christian took away a number of good suggestions, and lots of
contacts, and we still have to see how we can make best use of those.

Some projects that we have found interesting over the last months:
* IRC: Christian was told that this is an excellent tool for
developers on an Open Source project to communicate, and we have
started using IRC, and it is really helpful! Today we have had 8
developers online at the same time, and that was not even all
developers, some were offline. You find instructions for joining the
IRC channel on the website:
http://www.openpetra.org/index.php?lang=en&page=community-irc
* http://bigbluebutton.org/ for free voice conferencing, especially
helpful because we are working as a distributed team. We have not used
this software yet, though.
* http://www.mikogo.com/ this is a freeware tool for easy-to-use
cross-platform desktop sharing, we have found this very useful to help
new developers getting started, and have another pair of eyes to look
at strange bugs
* Greenhopper, Jira, Confluence: the tools from Atlassian for work
item tracking and wiki and agile work flows: we have had a brief look,
but at the moment we will continue with Mantis and MediaWiki hosted
with Sourceforge.
* We looked at git, and realised that the git setup we have had with
sourceforge was quite difficult to maintain and to adjust to our
workflows. Therefore we decided to look into alternatives, which
basically were mercurial and bazaar.

In the week after the first of Advent, which was in the end of
November and the beginning of December, 3 of the SolidCharity
developers travelled to Carlisle, UK, to meet the 4 developers who are
working with OM on Petra and OpenPetra. We also met the managers who
are actually responsible for spending money (that has been donated to
OM) on the development of OpenPetra. We are thankful that we had a
safe journey despite the snowy weather and quite a few delays on the
planes and trains. The meetings were good, there was a good
understanding of the common goals.
Major results were:
* We have realized that OpenPetra will be the tool of first choice for
growing and emerging mission movements from the "Global South". Global
South describes the part of the world that used to be the countries
receiving help and training for many decades, but where the church has
grown hugely over the last years, and should now be treated as an
equal partner in world missions.
* We now have an architecture board, with Thias and Christian, who
will delegate the investigation of topics to other team members, and
who will make technical decisions. In the end we want to have open
discussions, but it is also good when there is some structure in the
project.
* We have asked OM to provide us with a Product owner, ie. a person
that is full-time available to the OpenPetra project, and talks to
users and developers, so that the software will fit the needs of the
actual users. We as developers don't want to make decisions for the
users, and we cannot do all the interviews and negotiations.
* We have decided to switch from git to bazaar, and host that on our
own server. Bazaar supports a more centralized workflow, while still
allowing distributed development. Bazaar also is more restrictive than
git, which protects us from possibly breaking the history of a branch.
We wanted to get this done before the Taylor students would come in
the first days of January 2011, and with hindsight this was probably a
far too hasty switch. Anyway, we have worked hard on this project over
the past weeks, have written documentation in the wiki, and are still
learning our lessons.
* The other big topic was the project plan. The team in Carlisle had
worked over the months of autumn on the categorizing of the old 4GL
source code, and assigned levels of difficulty for each file. During
our meetings, we assigned time estimations to each level, which
allowed us to do a more appropriate estimation of the overall size of
the project, of things that still need to be done on OpenPetra until
it becomes an option to replace the old Petra. We also talked about
having a smaller version of OpenPetra, which would work already for
smaller offices inside and outside of OM, eg. offices that just do
bookkeeping, but don't use OpenPetra for personnel management. We have
not got a final project plan yet, but WolfgangB is working on that.
The project plan will not be set in stone, but should give us a
clearer picture and vision, which should encourage fund raisers and
other organisations and developers to join and support the project.

In the first days of January 2011, a group of 6 students with 2
members of staff of the Taylor university have travelled from the US
to the UK, to visit the OM offices in Carlisle, to get to know
missions and how their IT skills can be used in missions, and to help
with OpenPetra development. You can read an article about the visit
and with some photos of the team here:
http://www.taylor.edu/experience/stories/england.shtml
Read their daily updates on the blog of the trip: http://cmc.taylor.edu/

Over the last weeks, more volunteers have started looking into
OpenPetra, to see if they want to get involved. This is encouraging
for us, and we try our best to help with setting up the development
environment, even offering a remote Windows machines free of charge
which are really fast compiling and prevent people from needing to
install SharpDevelop and other tools on their own (slow) computer.
I am sorry that we are sometimes slow to answer emails. The best is to
write in the forum, and not personal emails to me. Talking to us on
the IRC channel is also a good way to get answers quite quickly.

Joachim, one of the first external volunteers, has worked hard with
the help of native spanish speakers on the spanish translation of the
OpenPetra client and the website. You soon will see the spanish
version of the OpenPetra website. This shows how OpenPetra will be
available in all sorts of languages and cultures, depending on the
volunteers that see a benefit in OpenPetra for their favourite people
group.

On the production side, DFN UK are using the centrally hosted version
of OpenPetra for managing their addresses, and they are looking
forward to do bookkeeping as well with OpenPetra. They found a number
of bugs when creating new partners, but were able to work around those
issues.
The annual gift receipts for the german Nazareth charity have been
printed again with OpenPetra. We discovered a number of bugs, some of
those have been resolved already.
Erich in the Ukraine is evaluating OpenPetra to be used as accounting
software for the charity he works for, and we are still working on
getting the import for finance data to work for him.

Projects we are currently working on (I probably have forgotten some projects):
* The Taylor students are working on better navigation controls for
the main screen, collapsible panels, and a framework for assistants
aka shepherds.
* MatthiasH is working on GL and Gift export and import
* WolfgangU is working on foreign currency accounts and foreign
currency transactions.
* MatthiasG is working on improving our NAnt scripts to generate csproj files.
* TimotheusP has to work on high priority on the online registration
for a conference that OM Germany are hosting in the end of July, and
people would like to register already now! This will utilize ext.js
and ext.net in combination with OpenPetra. You can find a demo here:
http://demo.openpetra.org:8009/
* JoachimM continues to work on the spanish translation of the
website, and also taking on smaller bugs developing in C#.
* ThomasS is working on importing generated data to establish a good
and big demo database, which we will be able to use for performance
testing and developing reports.
* ChristianK is working with the students, and will also continue to
improve the Partner Edit and Partner Find screens.
* WolfgangB is working on the project plan and still has other
responsibilties outside of OpenPetra.
* We have also got a good review of 2 people of our website, with
suggestions to improve the structure and presentation of information
for easy reading and getting to the pages people are looking for. We
need to find time to apply some of these suggestions.

Events for the coming months:
* A number of developers of software applications similar to OpenPetra
will meet at the International Conference on Computing and Mission
(ICCM) http://www.iccm-europe.org/ in February 2011. We hope to get to
know each other, recognize our common goals and different focuses, and
we will see where we can cooperate and how we can encourage each
other.
* In the end of February 2011 there is a meeting of christian business
people in Germany, http://www.fuehrungskraeftekongress.de/. Together
with the http://www.citar.de/ project we will have a booth there, and
hope to establish good contacts to business people who understand the
technical challenges that OpenPetra aims to address, and who might be
able to participate in the effort in one way or the other. We also
will meet representatives from charities and non-government
organisations, that might see the potential of OpenPetra.

As you see, the past 3 months have been very busy and very exciting.
It seems, this year 2011 will become quite interesting, and I cannot
estimate at the moment where we will be at the end of the year.
We need all the help we can get, since this task is huge, and even
when we try our best, we lack experience and resources, and we aim far
higher than we could humanly speaking get to.

Thank you all for your support!

I hope the next update will not be too far away, and it will be of
course be a little shorter, but who knows, if things get rolling...

All the best to you for 2011,
  Timotheus for the OpenPetra developers