A few thoughts: Jeff, nice try trying to help the board save face, but besides the money for the visual design, to say that it was really anything but all you for the last 2 years, would be changing humility, to down right revisionism. Yes, the board "supports you", but heck, they really don't have a choice.
Liz, HiveLive won't cut it. As soon as Nasir came back from the retreat and spoke to me about the boards push to HiveLive, I knew right away that it won't work. HiveLive is email independent for one and email HAS to be a core part of our infrastructure. There are so many other components missing from our requirements. We are trying to do something so much more broad than any one of these existing systems can handle, which is why we need to build this from the ground up. Also, that #. 10k? Does that really include them building the applications we need? To give a comparison, the customizations on Crowdvine normally got for $5k and the level of simplicity compared to what we need just for local groups let alone everything else we need is an order of magnitude more complex. So if they can do it for $10k, either they are geniuses (I have no belief they are), or they are not fully comprehending what our requirements are (and yes, I know exactly what the existing requirements are). Someone please point me to someone/something that proves me wrong here, b/c if it is all there ready to bake in a box, then I will be the 1st one to jump on board and go "Yeah!!!!!!" (BTW, we've been there before with other tools too, like NING, Tomoya, CollectiveX, even Drupal/CivicSpace. (BTW, they lost me at "no coding, just clicking"). My number of $100k, is based on the 15 years experience of project managing and designing and building enterprise software. Heck! the single desktop app that I'm working on now had $100k for ONE contract developer. What we are trying to do has never been done before. seriouslly, I've spent 2 years looking and nope! not out there. The level of integration and the type of features, across nested yet related communities of shared content types and various levels of administration privileges, and infrastructural tools, have not been combined in a single application/platform before. But let's take a step back. You asked that we just work on the "discussion list". Hmm? interesting choice. The heart and soul of the issues facing the discussion list, center around the same issues as those for local groups: membership/subscription management. The issues are entwined, so separating out "discussions" from "local" doesn't really seem to make sense for me because the first design challenge we face as a community is to make the subscription management system work across multiple contexts. This also means leaving mailman, creating an openID enabled system, and allowing people to have profiles with settings that go deeper than any system out there to date. Here was the suggestion I made to Nasir about 3 months ago, or was it 5 or so. I can't remember any longer. Convert your existing requirements into an RFP like document. Create a contest (yup! a context) that is judged at Ix09 (of course now it is too late, but then it wasn't). The winner of the context by a group of peers gets Platinum Sponsorship for free at Ix10 and their design (they gotta provide the documentation at least for how to do what they design, not just show pretty pictures) will be chosen by the board, converted yet again into a RFP to do fundraising against, or just find a vendor right away. OR and this is the yummy part. Enter the new requirements into an OSS project where developers can sink their teeth into probably one of the most amazing collaboration software problems we have seen this/next decade. Alternatively, I have also been talking with Aza Raskin at Mozilla about how we can create an open source project under the Labs banner, whose mission is to drive design into the OSS product development process. By having what you've done as a kick off, and using standard controls and freedoms inherent in the OSS movement we can move forward, and do so with higher efficiencies. Few clarifications: "design by committee" to me in this context (no offense) feels like "socialism" spouted by Sarah Palin. It is a scare tactic that really doesn't have any basis in reality, b/c OSS and even crowdsourcing is never "design by committee". Decisions are centralized, while ideation is de-centralized, and transparency is optimized to keep fresh ideas flowing. The other HUGE advantage of OSS is that you enable splinter groups to work on tangents independent from the core, that even get released outside the core release cycle to be honed in that context and easily be added to the core later (ala Google Labs on Gmail, or Greasemonkey, etc.) I appreciate the board's new sense of urgency, and as you know Liz, I'm an insider here, not an outsider, I know how hard the job is, but feel strongly that our differentiation as a community of practice from the grassroots perspective is only as innovative as the speed in which we keep innovating and growing against it. Key issues in our organization's future hinge on moving the virtual tools of this community forward while at the same time maintaining the high quality we have earned the expectation of from our community regarding the conference. In essence the board now has 2 organizations to run, not just one, even though they are so tightly entwined. -- dave . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=35123 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
