Forum OpenACS Development: Re: Preliminary vision statement open for discussion

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Posted by Frank Bergmann on
Hi,

It's really a pity - I've seen the dotWrk pages only a few days ago. Even Dirk Gomez didn't know about them. So I think I have duplicated some efforts...

I'm working on a similar project since June 2003. I started as a project management system for a local translation agency (http://www.sls-international.com/ - someone needs _high_quality_ translation into Spanish? 😊. Briefly checking for alternative system, I decided to go ahead with the old ACS 3.4.8 Intranet that is in productive use at Competitiveness (http://www.competitiveness.com/) with a few enhancements. So I spent the summer customizing the system and building a reasonable business solution.

Telling a few friends about the project and showing them the new GUI, they encouraged me to widen the scope and to actually design a "Project Resource Planning" platform, providing support for several vertical modules (Hi Malte!). So http://www.project-open.org/ popped up into existence.

Recently things got even a little more encouraging. I managed to convince a student from Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya to write his final thesis about building a translation marketplace module for Project/Translation and La Salle University approved a Knowledge-Management workgroup, staffed with 4-5 final thesis students. They are going to use Project/Open as their development base.

So the idea is starting to convert itself into real systems. I'm planning to publish some press releases as soon as I've got a reasonable demo system online.

The drawbacks of the system are its ACS 4.5.8 base, its lack of multilingual support and the restriction to Oracle. And I had to customize the platform quite a bit, in order to get a new fine-grained permission system working  (http://www.project-open.com/whitepapers/).

Code is currently not available publicly, because Project/Translation contains customer owned code. The current "Project/Advertizing" project with Opus 5 (http://www.opus5.info/, currently my first priority) will lead to a modularized system and the release of a "core" module and an "advertizing" specific extension module. I hope to finish this reorganization around 11/2003.

A lot of things are still open to discuss or clarify:

- Is Project/Open going to be a separate project, just using the ACS/OACS platform, or is it going to be integrated into OACS?

- How to design the relationship between dotWrk and P/O?

- How to deal with conflicts between the open-source idea and commercial interests? What does the history of ArsDigita and the current state of the OACS system teach us? How to integrate "business guys" into "the community"?

- Is OACS going to take over some of the P/O concepts, such as the fine-grain permission model and the configurable views?

- ... and many more.

Anyway, I think the follow-up discussions should take place in another thread, not to trash the great contibutions above...

Bests,
Frank

mailto:fraber@fraber.de, http://www.fraber.de/