I have some problems: 1) people ask me to contribute to more projects that I can handle. 2) I am good at kicking off a project (20% of the work) but I am not the best person to bring it to production (the other 80%) of the work. 3) I want to delegate some of these projects to users I trust. I need to better keep track of you, the users, your skills and interests.
You and I have some problems in common: 1) you are an individual or you own a small consulting company and you find hard to compete for large projects 2) you want to use web2py but you need to sell web2py before you can sell yoru services. 3) you need legal help (sample non-disclosure agreement, sample contracts, etc.) 4) for large projects you need to find people who can help you with development (you man need a designer, a coder, a system administrator, a GAE expert, etc). 5) you want somebody else to handle advertising for you I want to help. I want to help you find development jobs, network, and compete for larger projects by providing some assistance. I am about to create something like an association of web2py professionals with a portal that provides web sites for members, repository of legal forms, job posting, progress tracking, feedback forms, etc. Here is the basic idea: we do not advertise web2py, we advertise the association and its members. you find a client? you keep all the money. You want to offer your client long term support or code review? the association will sell that to the client directly directly. You want to be listed as a member? Follow a code of conduct (basically use approved tools and ask your clients to review your work publicly). You already have a consulting company or an employer? You can have the company listed as an associate under some conditions. We can turn our group into a large international consulting organization overnight. There would be no contract between the association and you other than a code of conduct that you will have to follow to be listed and that I am about to wrote. You can continue to work as an individual or with your existing company. The association will just help when you need help. The association may also partner with some member to provide venture capital in the form of code development (and perhaps money but not immediately) for specific projects submitted to the association, in exchange of shares. I have already incorporated to do this. This will be independent and complementary form web2py itself and web2py would not be the only tool in the association approved toolkit. For now the toolkit will include: web2py, ubuntu, postgresql, jquery, and google app engine. You as an individual or a company can provide services based on other tools but the association will endorse these tools because we can easily find people skilled in them and you, as a member, will be required to endorse these tools as good tools and demonstrate your skills in some of them (not all of them). web2py is a tool. We will all outlive web2py. But we have created something important here. A community of skilled professional that share some experience. I want to see this grow with web2py and beyond web2py later. I want to see us compete with large consulting companies. I want to do it using a new business model in which there are no shareholders to take a cut of your work since they would not be providing any means of production to you (you already own a laptop and that is your office), yet I want to provide the other benefits that a large corporation can offer (a single image, consistency, reliability). Not sure if there should be an admission criteria. I could use your feedback about this. Comments? Thought? You do not have to commit to anything now but who is interested? Massimo
