Scott Kveton

I just love my job. I can’t think of a more fun thing to do than to get together with like-minded folks and coordinate on possible projects. Especially when it has to do with open source.

I got a chance to meet with Jay Thompson yesterday from Edge Design about collaborating on a project. Edge has been around for about 20 years doing a mix of graphic design and web work. They have also done some pro-bono work for the likes of the Oregon Food Bank and the Children’s Cancer Association.

Jay has had contacts with several similar groups that are looking for technologies to help enable their organizations to better leverage their volunteers. On a second and third meeting with these different groups, he realized they all really wanted similar variations on the same tool. He immediately thought of open source and set out to find a technology partner to help make that happen.

Many of these non-profit groups have many volunteers and they need to be able to do an assortment of tasks (ideally from the convienience of a web browser). Track time on projects, scheduling of tasks/meetings, portfolio management and reporting. The idea would be to build a modular, open source application that does all of these (essentially an enhanced groupware) that allows users to enable/disable the bits and pieces they want as well as easily develop against the API to quickly extend the application. This is right up our alley.

I am very excited about working on this project. I think it would be an excellent opportunity for the OSL to get some more development work but would also give us a chance to help spearhead the creation of a trully useful open source tool that touches more than just a bunch of geeks (not that I don’t like geeks but they have a lot of fun software already).