More Refined Direction

After struggling to orient myself within the project, I found a list of suggested project ideas that the Sahana developers had put up for a CodeaThon for the project. The last one on the page, relating to extensions to support new use cases, was the one that got my attention. My interest was piqued at the suggestion of an implementation of Sahana Eden that was directed at business management tools for small artisans in developing countries, as well as for the larger organizations that they are involved with (Ten Thousand Villages being the given example).

After speaking with some of the developers, they seemed very interesting in me working on this front. The community surrounding the project definitely wants to see the now mature system implemented in other useful ways.

With that, I've put together a bit of an action plan for working on this angle:

1. Preliminary Research (mostly done)
   
2. Contacting Organizations (I'm here)
   
3. Building Use Cases
4. Putting together a blueprint
5. Developing the implementation
   

Given the possibility of various hang times in between trying to contact the appropriate people and organizations, I plan on further using the system and mostly focus on testing and fixing bugs in tandem. I am also planning on trying my hand on writing up user docs for some of the existing modules once I am qualified to do so (have literally no experience in user docs, so it should be interesting).

In the meanwhile, I've been testing out the various modules (found some bugs that I need to add to the tracker and will do so asap). I've also picked out a few bugs that I'm going to try to fix in the next few days (if I get Launchpad to be my friend, my contributions should get updated to the dashboard).

To keep this post not excruciatingly long, I am going to post the next subject (the results of my preliminary research) in a post to follow. I've been a bit overloaded this week, with my GRE this weekend, and am planning on picking up the pace after that.