ifPeople presents "social sourcing" at Plone Symposium NOLA

The goal of the New Orleans symposium, organized by Enfold Systems, is "to summarize the development and deployment experience of the veterans and pass those on to conference attendees. Save hundreds or hours of experimentation and learn the best practices from the pros." Several leading Plone community members presented at the event on topics ranging from best practices, tips-n-tricks, lessons from the field, and the current state and future of Plone itself. All sessions were video recorded and should be available shortly from the event web site.

ifPeople's cofounder Christopher Johnson spoke about his experience organizing and leading an open source project, GetPaid. GetPaid is a commerce framework that allows site owners to add a shopping cart to their Plone site and accept credit card payments, manage inventory, orders, and shipments, and more. Though not a developer, Christopher has taken the reins in leading a growing community in collaborating to produce this product. To date, nearly 15,000 lines of code have been contributed by 44 people and over 110 people follow the development of the product on its mailing list. Find more stats at Ohloh.

Christopher presented "social sourcing" as a way to involve non-developers in open source projects, generate a self-sustaining community, and leverage the wisdom of the crowd. He defines "social sourcing" as an organizing approach that gets diverse stakeholders to participate to the software making process that is focused on the value the software provides. The process to carry this out (which itself is iterative) is:

Outline of Social Sourcing, v1.0 Alpha ;)

• Study the market (benchmark)
• Put together a compelling plan
• Recruit the right people
• Engage a wide base in refining requirements
• Ask for money
• Celebrate successes
• Sustain it: fun, organization, motivation
• Regroup, review, and restart...