Requirements

Organic Design is now working with some other aligned organisations which have access to various sources of funding. This article is a general list of requirements we'd like to apply this funding to so that we can begin to make some real progress in getting the platform deployed.

Lead developer

This is the most important and hard to find role we need filled. The money would probably be around NZ80K for a full time position. We'd be looking for someone who prefers Linux, has worked extensively on projects in the open source community and is familiar with Python, JavaScript, P2P concepts and the Plone CMS.

We want to use Plone to set up sites for ourselves and our other associate organisations. The content of each site will have an overall node-like structure representing the ontology of the organisation, whereby each node is a portal for a particular entity or concept such as a department, role, user, project etc. The people who use each portal will be able use decision-making and collaboration tools to work on content together and to decide together what kind of access is granted to it and what other resources and tools will be available within their portal.

The tools we need to make available for use within the portals are decision-making tools, wiki pages, blogs, forums, chat/comms and basic project management. We're hoping that by using an existing and popular CMS like Plone that most of these tools will already be very close to the state we need them to be in.

Another important aspect we need is that we want this system to run in P2P space rather than on a standard client-server model. We realise that this is a big ask and we're happy for the main applicational functionality to be developed as a normal website initially with the P2P work being carried out in the background for the first year. Our research has indicated that the main obstacle to running a CMS in P2P space is SQL, which is why we've chosen Plone rather than one of the usual LAMP-based systems.

We'd like prospective developers to give us feedback as to the practicalities of this P2P aspect and how difficult they foresee it being, or indeed whether they even believe it to be possible with the Plone system. We need to know this from the start, because if Plone needs to be remodelled too much to satisfy this need, it may be best to develop our own CMS which is designed to run in P2P space from the ground up.