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Make technical development more open for non-CSA-organisations

As a lot of the web-technical needs of CSAs are similar to other organisations working in sustainable sections I'd prefer to open our communication-process to non-CSA-organisations aswell.

Our goal could be to define our requirements as abstract/open as possible to have a target group as broad as possible. Example: instead of "we need a listing of our harvest-depots including contact persons" we could define "we need the possibility to list data records (= harvest-depots) with variable informations to show and it shall also be possible to show data from other related data records (=contact person, possibly member of local CSA)".

By this our solution would be usable by many more organisations + we might get more developers involved.

We collected some contacts when we thought about developing the website http://transition-initiativen.de/ (Site of the transition network). I've created a page with these contacts (deleted personal email-addresses before), so feel free to add your contacts there.

What do you think about opening the dev-plans to the broader community?

Cheers,

Michael

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From agile software development perspective, I would disagree. It would be better to describe concrete requirements for our german CSA. But the implementation should be done in a way that it is flexible and easy to extend. But that's how drupal works, I guess ;o)

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I agree with Michael and that was actually the model that was thought for the development of co-munity - find commons needs, develop together. In my opinion, I don't see this being incompatible with an agile development perspective - and yes, Drupal is an agile CMS ;)

I agree also with Marc that we need to describe concrete requirements for the German CSA. However, the implementation can - and in my opinion should - be articulated with needs from other groups/initiatives. On the boat are the whole R&D and post-Degrowth conference stuff; tools for the Transition Network and initiatives (Germany, but maybe also UK, since they seem to also have chosen OA2); food cooperatives; trainers networks (GROWL).

The procedure in this case could be something like:

  1. look at specific needs separately
  2. plan together (e.g. scrum planning meeting)
  3. develop together (e.g. a scrum sprint)
  4. test separately
  5. fork when needed (fine tuning for separate uses)

I think by following such a model, we address what is usually the bottleneck of development for grassroots initiatives - human and monetary resources - by bringing together the little bits of each. In this sense, the list of contacts of Michael is a great first step (you might also want to read a few discussions I had 2-3 years ago and which resulted in this post and group before landing on ice). Please note that also the German Transition Netzwerk is *probably* getting involved in the development of co-munity and Hannes has actually been already active here.

As for workflow and tools: we started a GitHub project some time ago, but didn't really use it yet. I think it can be a good strategy to get everything related with makefiles, module and theme development there. I'm not sure about UI changes though, but I assume these can be exported as features and also added to the GitHub repository for reuse.

What do you think?

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Following the suggestion to make development more open to others - but also because I also wanted for sometime to create a kind of public invitation and structure the development process - I have posted this issue on the co-munity space.

I suggest that we further discuss how to collaborate on this open development there, while keeping whatever is CSA-specific (or whatever you find relevant to) here.