Communicating Open App

Go for it! Even more than raising money, I'm interested in you guys making a page that simply explains Open App that I can link others to. Crowdfunding pages often become that first step actually.

Update: nanz (just invited her, cobudget designer) has agreed to work on OpenApp identity branding and website outside of working on cobudget.

agreed @alanna, this week we've been focusing on how to communicate OpenApp. we're working on a rough document in progress, but it needs more love before it's ready to be public. feedback is encouraged. :)

Really like the idea of getting Open App Ecosystem development crowd-funded!

The following points I see as good to be 'resolved' before been able to launch such campaign:

1. Crowd-funding campaign for Open App Ecosystem development - means funding specific open app tools from the ecosystem or the entire ecosystem?

If opt for the latter - what is the entire ecosystem then and shouldn't it be designed to 'expand/progress/evolute' in time rather to be 'hit & go' initiative?

Mine input here is that it is quite hard and time consuming to describe and develop an Open App Ecosystem entirely. Imagine 100 completely autonomous and different parts working all together forming an open app ecosystem :)

Either we can describe/develop the MVP of it which will solve concrete problems or we can describe/develop the MV architecture principles/rules/patterns and let open apps be developed aligned between each other using that knowledge.

I would suggest to opt in for crowd-funding of specific pack of open apps and during their development to spec out fundamental patterns, technologies and standards for Open App Ecosystem foundations.

But I'm eager to see what's your take on this? :)

1. How the organization of the Open App Ecosystem development initiative is going to work? Will be there one team or there will be several teams involved? What will be the principles/procedures for joining new comers and what will be the requirements to be part of such initiative? And mainly - how and who will take control decisions of the raised funds? :)

I guess the answer is rather simple (after all we all do these kind of work everyday), but still I think it should be written down simple so that all involved parties can take it on forward :)

PS. I think that the Open App Ecosystem initiative and its development can be pushed to a self-sustainable state using its 'own' apps for driving the development/budgeting/accounting forward. In other words - with initial bootstrap crowd-funding injection if carefully planned will be able to result in ecosystem been capable to take forward its development and future funding using its own tools and principles. That will be win-win state as the resulted ecosystem will be also a proof-of-concept on its own and the use case to start with :)

I wrote :

I’d really love to here from the developers here what sort of money they think would be needed :)

and @vitaliyangelovfili responded :

Regarding money - I guess we should think in terms of people involved and their respective hour rates. Thinking about it lean we should focus raising money for 1-2 max full stack developers for 2-3 months of work. If we manage to get enough money for them to live - they can focus their entire work day only for that.

But, aren't there already more than 2 developers interested in this work? And wouldn't it actually likely take longer than 2 - 3 months to really get this project into a decent relatively mature state?

By 'decent relatively mature state' I mean (and am suggesting as our 1st major milestone):

Loomio and Cobudget and their integration with via identity and group apps, all up to the standards defined in the current README (and wrapped up in a docker container for easy deployment?) :)

I mean, who wouldn't want to fund that?! :)

What I want to know is:

1) to what extent would having a pile of cash help us get to this state sooner rather than later (I'd like it done yesterday please! :P )

2) who is willing and able to work for this cash to make this all happen sooner rather than later? how much time can they commit? when?

3) what is their estimate of how large would that pile of cash need to be and how long it might take to reach our 1st major milestone (as defined by me! :P) above?

Once we've answered these questions we can double the estimates and then say: if we raise x amount this team will work for x time create this awesome package - chip in now!

I liked @josefdaviescoates proposal above not necessarily for the exact idea, but because it was clear and concrete and asked some great questions.

@ahdinosaur - I love the idea of "managed trust".

Deep topic, though. More to distributed transaction protocols than "do you trust this other person". There's also "do you trust that your different apps agree over an unreliable network with possibly unreliable systems on this proposal".

(But I know that you know that...;)

@ahdinosaur please enable commenting on that document

@alanna done

Hey thanks everyone for all the supportive comments and discussion!

I guess Mikey and I have been taking a somewhat more cautious approach to funding. Prior to this I was working on Loomio's crowdfundng campaign, and while successful the Loomio team learnt that this is a lot of work for not really that much money.

I would describe the past two months as R&D, and 'value discovery' phases. Thanks to the user-testing with paper prototypes and Mikey's explorations in the server-side code we are only recently getting a picture of our core offering (graph search across the emerging Giant Global Graph and federated instances of OpenApp) and what we should focus on next. Now it has come time to communicate that with a simple website, some content and better docs and README on our github, Then, I'd like to see how people respond to the vision.

Current funding comes from Enspiral (~$1700 remaining) which has mostly paid me a minimal rate (but not too bad :), Mikey is self-funded, and I am also working part-time at DevAcademy.

I have a preference for funding to come from entrepreneurs who want to develop apps (particularly apps that align with our roadmap) with OpenApp technology and become part of the ecosystem. Part of the value offering is that we will eventually be able build higher quality apps, faster.

I'm cautious of committing to a big marketing push when we have 'aligned' or 'aligning' apps (loomio and cobudget, which I understand many people are excited about :), but no demos of what we believe to be the 'OpenApp difference'.