[foundation-board] Iconomical Situation

[Rufus Pollock]

On 4 February 2011 10:55, Jo Walsh <metazool at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 03/02/2011 16:55, Rufus Pollock wrote:
>>
>> On 3 February 2011 15:40, Becky Hogge<becky.hogge at gmail.com>  wrote:
>
> I just had a quick Skype chat with Liz. A key phrase here is:
>
> "there would be nothing worse than if all our hard work would go to the
> wall".
>
> In essence Iconomical need sign-off for the work they have done, and state
> they have done work in their own time to resolve issues raised.

But these are often issues that would never have arisen under a more
positive working setup from them and with a bit more attention to the
work they were doing ...

> Liz seemed surprised to hear that the key issue was the maintainable state
> of the source code, she is confident that Dave's work is in a good state to

That isn't the *key* issue. The key issue is, as I described:

a) does the code even build, does it have a readme
b) what about issues with the code. To excerpt from the email i sent
them on 29th and forwarded to the list:

<quote>
> Media Guild have indicated that they will gladly accommodate your
> requirements, as long as a contract has been agreed by all parties regarding
> the exact scope of outstanding work, and payment made for services rendered.

I would be happy to agree about the scope of existing work -- my one
concern is that there will be inevitably be bugs and polishing to be
done that it is hard to predict (none of this is about new features of
functionality).

Usually, I would have thought you guys would have done this (ie. gone
through the app with a fine tooth-comb, dotting the 'i's and crossing
the 't's). However, this hasn't occurred and as a result we keep
coming back with requests to fix up this or correct that (a recent
case in point: how does the iconography work in the bubble chart when
we aren't using cofog -- as is the case when we use the bubble diagram
in other situations e.g. barnet, dfid etc? I don't know exactly but
you guys are obviously aware of this requirement so I would imagine
you have considered it but if you haven't it will be something that
gets raised as a bug. Similarly, I didn't even know there was
drill-down in the compar-o-tron until the other day - at which point
there were some issues (e.g. no hover effect etc))
</quote>

I would also point out there have been endless efforts to get them to
use the ticketing system to plan out and describe work, largely to no
avail. (As a result endless emails with things getting lost because
not tracked etc).

> handover, they would be happy with a mutual-escrow type arrangement for code
> and payment, but sign-off seems more a key issue.

I'm sort of surprised frankly given that on several conversations (and
email) I've explained to them that:

a) The agreement was for code to be open-sourced going forward (from
July agreement) (I had constantly asked for this from Dave but was
told he was too busy and accepted this in good faith ...)
b) Almost every time I've released code to someone else it hasn't
worked first time (due to forgetting about some build dependency, a
missing step etc) it seems essential for them to give us the code
first so people can try out building it *before* we sign off and pay
them money

This is now wasting so much of everyone's time that it is probably
best to just pay them and move on but I'm *really* unimpressed by
their behaviour here.

Rufus