[open-government] Froide and Alaveteli

Thu Apr 11 13:01:21 UTC 2013

Hi all,

I saw this thread and I thought I should drop in one important, but
entirely non-technical point that might be of relevance to people weighing
up both options.

Alaveteli, crucially, has dedicated funding to expand and improve it: it
will definitely keep getting better for at least the next two years (thank
you very much to both Open Society and Hivos for this help).

More important than having money is what we can do with it: we are in a
fortunate position to be able to spend basically all this money on making
the code better for *other people*, not us ( our UK instance -
WhatDoTheyKnow.com is pretty mature anyway with 320,000 unique visits last
month, and doesn't need lots of new features). So we don't really need to
spend the cash on our own needs, we can spend it on making the code as good
as it can be for people who want to launch sites around the world.

To give you a concrete example, James McKinney said a few months ago that
he would prefer the project if it was in more up-to-date versions of Ruby
and Rails. This is a huge and relatively tedious process, but it mattered
to James, and we believe it will matter to other people like him. So in
collaboration with our friends at Open Australia we started the upgrade,
mainly because James asked for it. It'll be done soon.

So that, I think, is the main difference other than the programming
language - we're in a *very, very lucky* position to be able to put in a
lot of our time into solving your problems and adding features to meet your
needs. Which, I hope very much, will increase the sense that Alaveteli is
owned by a community, not one organisation.

all the best,

Tom
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