Prior Art

[Alan Dayley]

On Thursday 24 March 2005 01:11 am, Trent Shipley wrote:
>
> My purpose is to challenge  EPP/PEP's momentum and force it's backers
> into a contest to sharpen the "business case" for PLUG's development
> project.  If we are lucky, there will be more than just two proposals
> to choose from.

Or two live projects to choose to join.  I don't know that we have enough 
group participants to support two projects but, it's FS/OSS so anyone is 
free to do what they want.

> Therefore:
>
> * I encourage the EPP/PEP folks to produce a counter response.
> * I look forward to comments on the presentation.
> * I look forward to proposals for projects besides EPP/PEP and ticket
> market.

Flipping quickly through the presentation I see the following difficulties 
that don't fit for PLUG:
* Involvement and target of all members of the industry: "venues, 
promoters, resellers, and retail consumers."
[This means many customers, ie. a venue does not necessarily want the same 
interface and operational parameters as a reseller.  Each target customer 
will take significant research and development effort.]
* Lots of API documentation.
[Lots of writing and tight coordination within the development team and to 
external customers.]
* System admins, DB admins, many developers.
[Coordination of effort large.  Each admin "interface" is another 
"customer"]
* Tax aware and locale aware
[Who will pay for tax tables?  Who will stand behind the accounting being 
correct?  PLUG is not a legal entity.]
* Enforcement of distribution agreements
[Who will sign the NDAs, etc. to know what the distribution agreements 
are?  How do we convince "venues, promoters, resellers, and retail 
consumers" to tell us?]
* Understand CAD and seating charts
[Wow.  That is a huge project unless there is GPL software somewhere that 
we can leverage.  Even then that is big, I think.]
* Support for scalping
[Legal liabilities in different jurisdictions.  Know a no cost lawyer?]
* Ecommerce capability and fraud control
[I haven't done this sort of thing for about 9 years.  Back then it was 
not easy to get testing access to bank interfaces, etc.  Nor was it 
cheap.  Maybe that is different now.]
* Lot's of APIs for the various customers, including a command line
[Sounds like real work.]
* The pilot with only 3-5 customers is still huge
[All the functionality previously discussed will be almost the same amount 
of work for 3 as for 30 customers.]

Sorry, that is alot and it all sounds very negative.  To sum up my first 
impression, I would say its just too ambitious.  Way too big.  With the 
current group participation and doing this in leasure time, this scope 
would take years to implement.  The documentation alone is a many 
man-month effort.  Each customer interface is probably man-weeks.

I would suggest you look to start smaller instead of pitching the "big 
dream."  I don't know the ticket sales business so I don't know where a 
good domain boundry rests.  Maybe just do the venue part, for example or 
a reseller part that interfaces to the "evil" Ticket Master, if that is 
possible.

The alure of the Event Planner is that it can start small, supporting a 
simple InstallFest, and grow if the interest is keen from there.  It also 
initially "scratches the itch" of the group by making something PLUG does 
easier.

I certainly like the general presentation.  You seem to have covered all 
the bases and are thinking the entire thing through.  I don't want to 
douse your flame of enthusiasm and encourage you to pursue the project 
how you see fit.  Just providing my first blush opinion.

I am sure discussions will continue.

> Yes, I do think my Ticket Market Project is at least as good as the
> Event Planner idea and expect it to be given serious consideration.

I certainly will continue to seriously listen and learn about it!

Alan