Desirables:

Customer:

*Primary (initial) customer: non-political, non-religious charity or government agency.

*Wide enough in application that many customers can find a use for the product.

Wide range of talent and experience:

*Associate and Bachelor's and entry level developers do most of the coding to interfaces and with mentoring.  Also, documented experience for would be UX designers and technical writers at this level.

*Master's, junior, and intermediate level programmers provide architecture, mentoring, and difficult programming.

*Senior volunteers provide overall architecture, general direction, etc.

*Juniors should have contribution documented so that it contributes to the juniors' marketability.

Designs should be applicable to jobs in industry:

*Secure

*Scale from desktop to enterprise/intranet to internet

*Modular

*Use current design standards (for example, REST)

*Microservices

Technologies:

*Technologies should be focused on what is currently in demand by in demand by industry (fostering marketable skills.)

*Marketable programming language (I'm partial to Java).

*If at all possible use big data tool, notably Hadoop.

*Internet programming tools (Spring)

*git

*et cetera