As everyone who has participated in the development of Interchange knows, there are generally 2 ways that features get developed in an open source project.  One, a developer has extra time on his hands and has a burning desire to add a feature to the program, or two, a paying client needs a feature developed for their particular needs and pays a competent consultant to develop that feature, which in turn finds its way back into the community.

This simple explanation does not give proper credit to those developers who endeavor countless hours of late night coffee consumption and are driven to solve problems or make additions to Interchange for the good of the program itself.  These developers are not completely driven by a sense of altruism, (although you could argue that in a good many cases) but rather realize that by keeping this product competitive with other similar products on the market, they insure the continued client base needed to support their businesses.

Over the course of several years there have been many projects that were desired by many users of Interchange, but because of the size of the project, and the lack of suitable clients to foot the development bill, developers simply could not justify the many hours needed to attack the project.  There has been much talk about community development, one where many users could make a modest contribution to a project, thereby providing a pooling of funds that could be used to compensate a developer for the time needed to complete the project.

One roadblock to this approach has been simple logistics. While there are many ways to approach this, we at Perusion have decided to create an area of our website designed to deal with this problem.  We will start with a simplistic approach, and as we develop it and improve it, we will make it freely available to any other qualified developers who would like to add it to their site.  This could be handled centrally from the ICdevgroup website, but the ICdevgroup site has been set up without the connotations of a for-profit organization.  The fact that the hosting is generously provided by Endpoint, that all of the design, maintenance and upkeep is donated time, just creates an atmosphere that should remain free of enterprise related operations. 

The mail list of course will always be the genesis of most of these projects, and as projects are discussed on the mail list, we will post those projects that we feel interested or qualified in, along with a time cost we feel it would require for the project. We would encourage all other qualified developers to do the same.  The projects will be listed on our site, along with the a list of current pledges towards the project, as well as a balance needed to proceed.  This way members can sign up to support the project, track how many more are needed to reach the desired level, and so on. Once the level of pledges has been reached for a project, we will collect the pledges and engage the project.  No money will be collected until the level of pledges reaches the target amount.  As I said earlier, we will start with a rudimentary sign up and tracking, and will develop the process as time allows.