Is Community Weaver a proprietary system?

There have been CW1, CW2, and now CW3. I have used the first two. Unfortunately, CW3 is not an open source project. It is a custom coded proprietary project with little support when compared to CW2.

I'm still using CW2 and my site still is more advanced than CW3. The other more popular custom TimeBanking S/W is TnT by hOurworld. It has been adoped by TBUK as their new platform. Like CW3, TnT is proprietary but has considerably more and better technical support than CW3. Many CW2 TimeBanks have migrated to TnT.

TBUSA has already limited their technical support for CW2 (if they ever truly had any to begin with) and I suspect they will decalre it non-supported soon. CW2 is running under D6 and isn't upgradeable to D7 or D8 in its present state. I'm considering moving to Matt's Community Forge TimeBanking S/W. Matt's Drupal based complimentary currency module is state of the art and he and his team have put together a best of breed solution.

CW3 is a risky solution in my opinion because if a key programmer were to somehow be out of commision (accident, health, etc) CW3 would not be maintainable!

You may find a better summary of avilable S/W here:
http://www.appropedia.org/Community_Currencies
Although it doesn't yet list CW3 since CW3 was just released and has few installs as of today.

Hope this info helps

Jim,

The rumors of my impending death are grossly exaggerated.

I'm the developer of Community Weaver 3 and unfortunately your note above unnecessarily slams CW3. As I've personally supported you on CW2 issues I'm surprised to hear you criticise our support.

First - please elaborate on "little support" - we have three dedicated individuals whose entire goal in life is to support CW2 and CW3, including myself who wrote the software, and, yes we support CW2 Drupal issues still. Much of my support time this I donate to the community because I want CW3 to be successful and I believe in the TImebanking model.

Similarly, we are releasing new versions every two to three weeks, fixing issues, and responding to community feedback. This is, in my mind, great support.

I'm confused as to why you'd say that CW2 is more advanced than CW3. CW3 has a ton more features than CW2, is based on modern development libraries, and works on every device (phone, tablet) seamlessly. It has far more customization options, a far simpler user interface, and a clean modern look. CW2 is based on Drupal 6 which will be end-of-lifed this year, and, IMHO - looks dated compared to modern web technologies.

If you're a software developer and want to write your own custom code for CW2, then sure, CW2 has more to offer you, same way that Home Depot is the "more advanced" option when I want to put a new bathroom in my home. But becauase Drupal 6 is going away soon - I wouldn't recommend building anything new with CW2 today.

TnT doesn't allow you to write code or modules for it either so your comparison fails there and you're just not being fair to CW3 for some reason.

If you want to write your own software and customize it, definitely look at Matthew Slater's work with Community Forge - he's donated a lot of work and should be commended for his gifts to the community. Most of the CW2 code for TimeBanking was based on his work, so the work continues there for all who want to build their own timebanking system.

Part of the nightmare of CW2 was hundreds of individuals tinkering with Drupal 6 (which, while a great platform - is not for beginners) and creating incompatibilities with the various configurations. The fact that TBUSA maintained hundreds of different variations of Drupal 6 installations over the past several years should be applauded; as one of the people supporting it – it's not a simple task.

CW2 is based on Drupal 6, and yes, the work to upgrade it to Drupal 7 was massive; so we will be migrating the remaining CW2 sites to CW3. Drupal 6 will likely hit end of life in October and we are acting appropriately to avoid security issues, etc.

Finally, your "risks" about CW3 which portend my impending death are a bit of "FUD" - Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt - and are a bit of an exaggeration.

And the risks are identical if the key developer of TnT (Stephen Beckett) would pass away, and for that matter if Matthew Slater were to suddenly die.

This is true of any software, but the truth of the matter is that if ANY of us were to die -the organization who developed the software would find another developer to maintain it. I'd like to think I'm irreplacable, but the truth is - there are many people out there who can write software, and that number is growing daily.

So, please be accurate about Comunity Weaver 3. I'm sorry you think we have "little support," hopefully we can change your mind if you allow us.

Best,

-Kent.

Here's the short answer: CW3 is not built on Drupal 8, it's built on another open-source toolkit and lots of open-source third-party software.

The core of the CW3 application is not open source, however. This was the choice of TimeBanks USA who both developed the software and invested a lot of time and money to do so. I can't really discuss their choice to not release the software, but I understand why they've made their decisions.

Let me directly address Jim's issues then:

It is a custom coded proprietary project with little support when compared to CW2.

It's custom coded and it's proprietary, yes. However, my interpretation of his term "support" is related to his usage of "Technical support" twice after. You can interpret this loosely as "support for open source" or you can interpret it as support for the hosted software. I choose to interpret it as "technical support" because it's referenced that way twice more, an I think I refuted this directly. TBUSA has dedicated support and development for CW3, and we are now on version 3.1 and have had releases every few weeks. CW2 was not updated for years. So Jim's statement is, IMHO, patently false.

For that matter, CW2, while "open source" was offered as a "hosted product" on TBUSA's servers and did not allow access or modification to the installed source code on the installed server systems, and offered add-on modules ONLY to a select few individuals, so his assertion that CW2 was "open source" is not true, either. There was an attempt (before my time) at one point to create an image of the source code but it was poorly documented and didn't work.

I'm still using CW2 and my site still is more advanced than CW3

Jim offers no evidence here aside from his opinion. I heartily disagree with this, and it's a slam of CW3. http://wiki.timebanks.org/wiki/Improvements,_Changes_and_New_Features

Like CW3, TnT is proprietary but has considerably more and better technical support than CW3.

Jim's opinion. I disagree. We have a thriving user base, links to context-sensitive help on every page on our site, and our software is vastly easier to use, looks better on more devices, and offers more functionality than CW2 and T&T in many aspects. My humble opinion.

CW3 is a risky solution in my opinion because if a key programmer were to somehow be out of commission (accident, health, etc) CW3 would not be maintainable!

I addressed this already, and it's FUD. It's also an unfair assertion, as this applies to pretty much any choice people make, or for that matter, you could hire a vendor to modify your Drupal installation and ... gasp ... they could be "out of commission" or "not complete the work" or even introduce more bugs into your installation. Like is full of risks and this particular risk is one which I see little chance of happening.

I'm not intending to mislead anyone into thinking that CW3 doesn't have vendor "lock-in", but the truth of the matter is that most software used by most "regular people" (not developers) is proprietary and has vendor lock-in. (Think iPhone, Windows, Mac OS X, etc.) Am I attempting to mitigate Jim's attempts to instill fear in anyone who may wish to choose CW3 over, say, Matthew Slater's work? Yes, of course. Because it's not founded in any evidence, and because Jim is spreading FUD when it's my experience as the lead developer that what he's saying is not true, nor has been true in my time working with Timebanks USA.

It's my opinion that choosing the Drupal ecosystem locks one into that architecture as well; as does choosing an alternative ecosystem like Wordpress. The more you build your data into any of these architectures you are buying into the platform, and over time it becomes more and more difficult to "migrate away" from said platform without paying "your selected vendors" to get away from the platform to switch to another, for example. Yes, you have access to the source code and can hire whomever you choose to maintain it; and this is a great advantage. But there's additional costs and risks to going the open source route (largely requiring developers to participate often in maintaining such systems), which is why many, many people go the route of proprietary solutions: They just don't want to deal with fixing the wiring in their house or re-do their Kitchen - they just want to sleep and eat in their house and get a good night's sleep without worrying about the plumbing, wiring, or "internals" of how things work.

The truth of the matter is that most TimeBanking groups have low technical skills and are not really able to work with advanced technologies like Drupal 7/8 and installing and maintaining modules, etc. I tried to put that nicely in my response, stating that the patchwork of D6 installations in addition to the security implications of running 500 copies of D6 were a nightmare to manage.

Jim, it appears, was one of those exceptions; he has higher technical skills that most of the other Timebanks out there. But to slam CW3 unnecessarily when alternatives like Matthew Slater's work are available as a migration option is unfair to CW3 and I will still defend TBUSA for the work they've done to make CW3 a great product which they are still supporting to this date.

This is called vendor lock-in, and your entire reply to Jim seems designed to obscure this. Considering you are the "vendor" to TB USA in this case, I can think of at least one reason why you would go to such length to distract people from the implications of vendor lock-in.

Well, that wasn't my intention. Unlike Time and Talents, we don't lock you away from your data; all of the data in CW3 is fully exportable down to a transactional level so that you could feasibly reconstruct the entire history of your Timebank elsewhere if you wished, and move it to another platform if you had the technical know-how. So you are now exaggerating the degree of "vendor lock-in" here, I'm unsure why. And please, if you think there's some reason for us to lock people into the Timebanks USA software you don't need to insinuate it – please let us know. And to paint me having some ulterior motive here is ludicrous. We've had people migrate away from Community Weaver to other platforms, and we've had people migrate to Community Weaver from other platforms, and we've never stood in the way of anyone who wished to leave and we welcome migrations to CW3 with open arms. I'm an advocate for CW3 because it's great software, not because I want to lock people into it and take away their software freedom. There's enough options out there for TimeBanking that we should all be able to coexist peacefully.

I hear your point about the community of open source software and the support that that gives for those types of projects. These are all great things; I have contributed to open source software and I use it zealously; so I'm not pretending here that one is better than another, they are different choices that people make and each choice has advantages and disadvantages.

This is probably not the venue for this, but you could argue that your response deliberately obscures the risks and issues with choosing open source software which is rife with issues with stability, maintainability, costs, and going down a rabbit-hole of development which many Timebanks are poorly prepared and able to take on.There is a reason that the vast majority of TimeBanks choose proprietary solutions - they are not developers nor do they wish to take on the burden of developing software. As a developer, I inherited a mess of vastly different open source installations of CW2, and it was a bad thing for the stability and security of running a hosted solution. So forgive my bias but it's based on my experience.

However, my final point is this, and I think it's both clear in Jim's question and in my response: Software requires regular maintenance and support to develop and thrive. Jim's concern was that CW3 was not being supported by individuals or by the company behind it; I continue to assert that it is and will be in the coming years.

Jim could have answered the question and discussed moving to Matthew's Slater's modules for D7/D8 without slamming CW3 in the process.

Best,

-Kent.