CCMA09: IS4C!

— Tak Tang, Wedge Com­mu­nity Co-op & Joel Brock, People’s Food Co-op

The final work­shop of the con­fer­ence.  An IS4C demon­stra­tion, includ­ing its his­tory and its evo­lu­tion, lead­ing all the way up to the lat­est releases of Fan­nie.  I got to co-present this work­shop with the esteemed Tak Tang, who i have had the plea­sure of work­ing with many times in the past.  Tak gave a quick walk­through of the steps that led up to the Wedge Co-op decid­ing to build their own POS system.

1. Can i see a list of what we sell?
2. Can i see just this one item and what it costs?
3. Can i see a few items and get their total?
4. Uh.  This is almost a POS already…

Of course, 10,000 lines of code later, IS4C is run­ning suc­cess­fully in pro­duc­tion at 5 co-ops in the US.  These range in size from ~$2M to ~$30M in annual sales.  But even once the soft­ware was ready, it wasn’t going to do any­one else any good because there was no back end to the pro­gram.  You couldn’t cre­ate, edit or destroy any info in the POS with­out know­ing your way through byzan­tine back chan­nels of the system.

Enter Fan­nie.

One of my con­tri­bu­tions to the over­all project has been the cre­ation of a uni­fied back­end that we call Fan­nie, which fits directly on top of IS4Cs exist­ing data­bases.  The miss­ing piece was in place.

I gave a brief demo of Fannie’s fea­tures.  Then a not-so-brief expla­na­tion of why i feel it is so impor­tant that co-ops be look­ing at open-source solu­tions to com­mon prob­lems, such as POS.  In a nut­shell:  Values-based busi­nesses such as coop­er­a­tives, need to address every busi­ness deci­sion from the per­spec­tive of, “How will the out­come of this deci­sion fur­ther or hin­der the achieve­ment of our ends?”  We do this with produce-bying, we do this with office sup­plies, but we almost never con­sider the social impact of our soft­ware choices.  Is it because we don’t fel like we have a choice?  Is it because Microsoft really is in line with our mis­sion, vision, and val­ues?  Given the choice (and we do have a choice) shouldn’t co-ops be opt­ing for the soft­ware that encour­ages com­mu­nity, vol­un­tary par­tic­i­pa­tion, active democ­racy, and coop­er­a­tion?  Rhetor­i­cal ques­tion.  Yes, a thou­sand times yes.  Open source soft­ware is this values-based solu­tion.  And co-ops need to stop draw­ing imag­i­nary lines in the sand across which their ethics no longer need apply.  IS4C is one such open source, coop­er­a­tive solution.