[software] Call for evaluation of Donor.com

[Josh Berkus]

Folks,

Thanks to Jim Brandt, we have the strong possibility that existing, mature 
donor-management software DonorWare (www.donor.com) will be open-sourced.  
Here's the plan for that, which requires your participation.

Specifically, I need to know how many of you would be able to participate in 
an online demo and Q&A session on either of these dates: (indicate your 
availability for each):
Tuesday, September 9, 10am to Noon Mountain Time:
Thursday, September 11, 10am to Noon Mountain Time:

I'm very excited about this.  If you go to www.donor.com, you'll see that it's 
already a fairly mature package which does a lot of the functions we already 
need for donation management, and has quite a few features we'd never have 
developed for ourselves.  The codebase is in C & Perl, there's a fairly 
well-defined middleware API level on which we can stick our own interfaces.  
Also, they've already put ownership of the software under a 501(c)3 
nonprofit.

One caveat is that it doesn't do full accounting, just pre-accounting.  
However, it does have an "umbrella" concept.

This would be the tentative timeline of open sourcing this software if it 
happens:
====================
September 9 or 11: A group of us participate in an online demo session to help 
us evaluate DonorWare.

September 13: We give Mike at Donor.com an endorsement that the FLOSS 
foundations would use his software and help with post-OSS improvement if it 
was open-sourced.

September 18: Mike takes this to the board of Donor.com and gets approval.

October: we get our first non-public versions of the software to play with.

November-April: several of us use DonorWare and work with the Donor.com 
development team to improve it based on our needs.

July: Donor.com announces the 


-- 
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL
San Francisco