03 April 2009, 10:14

I would like to invite you to fund the following feature together in order to get this point done quickly:

Request:

MAHARA should be accessible via mobile browsers (eg. iPhone). Therefore new templates have to be produced. A model of this (old) idea you will find at http://m.facebook.com.

It's not necessary to implement new or other features, only to display existing features with new mobile templates. For users it could be interesting e.g. to get message alerts or friendship requests or to look into views of other users.

Collaboration Bid:

I can imagine, that this coding will take only a view hours for CATALYST IT Ltd. and with a collective funding affordable for a group of individuals. If you like to discuss this feature please feel free to contact me. For fast implementation simulators could be used.

Hard Coded Option:

By the way: If you are a software engineer and you are interested to implement this feature hard coded for my application www.tourismtalents.org singular on your own, please get in contact with me to see if you can make me a special quotation. Please consider that this codes have to be draged along all future releases of the core MAHARA code (follow-up-orders possible!).

03 April 2009, 18:52

Dietmar - I feel compelled to point out that how long you feel it will take a company such as Catalyst IT to do a certain piece of work is not related to how long it will actually take - Catalyst has not produced any of these numbers you are quoting in your requests, and we will not pay attention to them should you approach us with a genuine request to fund them.

As with all work we do, a full functional spec is required, and may either be provided by yourself or you may pay someone else to do it. 

08 April 2009, 14:54

Hi Nigel. I understand. Please feel free to post a final concept with feasible all-purpose features and the costs for this MAHARA extension. When costs are clear It could be realistic to find a group of people to finance this extension together. Please provide the MAHARA community also with a concept to ensure that others who didn't participate on funding don't be able to use the extension (at least for a period of time, e.g. 12 months)!

08 April 2009, 17:35

Dietmar,

This is not how development is done in the open source community.

We develop work for a fee, but if that work is suitable for the core then it is contributed for all to benefit. We have done this previously with the Group improvements, View Templates, devolved administration and other features of Mahara.

We also charge for our time spent planning how to implement a feature. Our expertise is our most valued asset! If we were to spend a lot of time thinking about the best way to implement something, only to have the work not be commissioned, then we have wasted a lot of our valuable time.

I have three people on the Mahara team, and we're all busy with work that's both good for Mahara and that pays the bills. I'm sorry, but we absolutely do not have time to spend speccing lots of functionality for no reward - the community would rather we continued working on bug fixing, Import/Export and other cool features for the next version of Mahara.

Other members of the community, such as Glasgow University and Ray Merrill/GLISI have been most happy to pay for our time and expertise, and have also been happy to contribute their work back to Mahara. I'm afraid that's the baseline you will have to compete with.

If you wish us to spec a piece of work, then we will charge for this service. In return, you'll get a solution that I guarantee you will work properly, integrate nicely with Mahara and reduce your long-term costs. It's only a couple of days planning up front in most cases, but the long term benefits are huge.

09 April 2009, 1:51

Hi Nigel! Thanks for your detailed explanations on that. It was really important for me to understand the way you work, what I didn't till now. I understand that big institutions like the Glasgow University have big budgets and public tax receipts to spend a lot of money on core as well es extension features which will be provided to "competitors" in the environment of universities for free afterwards. I have to think about this situation as I'm a single person with no such huge budgets. I will get back to you in this matter at a later date. Thanks! Dietmar