[Environmental] RE: A Round of Introductions?

[Sam Stainsby]

Hi all,

I suppose I should "de-lurk" too :-)

I run a very small family/home-based company called Sustainable Software 
(http://sustainablesoftware.com.au/) that provides Plone hosting, 
customisation work and training with clients involved in environmental 
and other sustainable activities. We are based in Australia, and have 
ongoing work agreements with The Wilderness Society and the Queensland 
Greens (political party), as well as international clients. We pride 
ourselves on being able to adapt to the shoestring budgets that many 
NGOs/non-profits have. Generally, for clients that engage us for 
customisation work, we provide hosting at near cost price.

I'm heavily involved in the Greens political movement, which is what got 
me into the Plone business in the first place. When volunteer work began 
to take over my life and paid work, I decided I needed to start a 
company so that we could do the good work, and get bread on the table at 
the same time. I still do vollie work for the Queensland Greens as well 
(moderating their internal forums, handing out how-to-vote cards, 
providing free consulting, etc.). Our company is planning a new project 
to use a percentage of our profits to sponsor children in Ethiopia 
through the World Families Australia programme.

I selected Plone as our main solution after being contracted to do an 
intensive review of CMSs for The Wilderness Society. I was impressed by 
its enterprise-ready features that allow simple websites solutions to 
scale up over time into complex web applications without hitting any 
barriers. These days, I'm am a registered Zope contributor, and also 
regularly interact with the Plone developer community including 
reporting bugs (sometimes with fixes) to the Plone project. I'm spending 
a lot of time at them moment making sure our solutions will run on the 
upcoming Plone 3.0, which has some major enhancements that users, 
particularly site managers, are going to love.

We are developing an open source product that allows ordinary users to 
"manage contacts, personnel, organisational structures and 
organisation-wide authentication using an intuitive Plone web interface":
http://sustainablesoftware.com.au/projects/ssidm
The code and time for this was generously donated by The Wilderness 
Society and the Queensland Greens, and is based on live, working systems 
and hence real-life use-cases.
We also have a couple of other projects that have not gone public yet:
   - an Plone shop product that just works out-of-the-box (code 
generously donated by The Royal Scottish Country Dance Society)
   - an accounting framework (used by the shop)
   - a tasks management tool (to-do list on steroids)

Basically, our projects evolve as we attempt to solve problems for our 
clients or ourselves (the task manager project!). We love writing code 
and we love a challenge!

Cheers,
Sam.

-- 
Sam Stainsby  -  Managing Director
Sustainable Software Pty Ltd
"open knowledge :: social conscience"
ABN:     32 117 186 286
WWW:     http://sustainablesoftware.com.au/
E-mail:  sam at sustainablesoftware.com.au
Jabber:  sjstainsby at jabber.org
Tel/Fax: +61 7 3289 5491    Mobile: +61 405 380 844