Yikes, acrimony and emotions running high in this thread. In talking about the challenges with this method, I wasn't clear about my thoughts on the rest of the picture: - We have a set of requirements that is fairly unique to a Community of Practice - Packages exist that can cover *most* of our wish list - People in our community are willing to dream up and build solutions to emerging challenges to our infrastructure - Yes, we need a system "YESTERDAY"!
To build our system, we could go completely crowdsourced/OSS, which will extend our timeline a lot (working on volunteer time, a central person picking the 'right' ideas, etc), or we can get our core wish list designed and built on a much quicker timeline by writing a check, and the rest can be built with a combination of crowdsourcing, OSS, and paid development. This quickly gets us a system ready to move into, providing locals the space they need. As the needs arise (e.g. a great new idea for handling discussion) the community can design and build them in sandboxes. But first we need our core infrastructure built quickly. We're baking in, as a central requirement, an easy way to allow members of our community to step up and try bolting on new innovations via an API or a self-documented codebase (preferably BOTH). This is all a thought experiment until we have something to build onto ... As Liz mentioned, an RFP is in the works. Let's not jump to a conclusion that this thing is going to take $100k to build. Maybe $80k of it has already been built and all that's left to build is the balance? Whatever! All of these numbers are bunny-fluff until we get some cold, hard proposals for solutions and their costs in our grubby hands. Heck, maybe this whole concept is infeasible financially and the solution is to build from scratch after all, but let's see what comes out of the RFP. Maybe I'm being Pollyanna here, but I'm betting on a pleasant surprise. Either way, we're getting an answer quick! - Nasir ________________________________________________________________ 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
