The story of GetPaid and a "social source" process to create new opportunities with Plone

Plone conference 2007, Naples. Speaker: Christopher Johnson

This talk is about how Plone GetPaid is being developed. We made a name for how we did that: Social Source.

Developers are often not too happy about input from others. "We know quite well what we need to do, thank you."

How you get it done determines what you get done.

We saw that Plone was flexible and useful out of the box. But payment through Plone was not possible, so you had to use other products. We wanted to do something about that.

I am an entrepreneur, not a developer, and I did not know much about e-commerce when I started.

Step 1. So we started looking: what is already out there? Why do we need something else. We wrote about that on the website of GetPaid: http://plonegetpaid.com.

Step 2. Then we made a plan. What do you do and how? Who is going to benefit? And make the site pretty.

Step 3. We recruited leaders and participants.

Step 4. We refined the requirements. We got input from users, developers, UI experts.

Step 5. We asked for money. If you do not ask, you will not get it. How to ask? Connect needs with value: how does it help them? Be transparent about what you do with the money. Be patient and persistent.

Step 6. We celebrate successes. Reward and recognize people. Communicate about recent developments in the project: what has been done?

Step 7. Sustain it: have fun together, motivate people.

We had three sprints so far. The code is at Google Code. We have a blog, mailing list, irc channel #getpaid.

Perhaps Plone could benefit from a process like this? Where is Plone going? What is our vision? Developers and users should answer that question. [Someone from the audience says: Alexander Limi is going to announce something about that this week.]