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Information The idea behind Kardia is simple: to create and encourage collaboration between missions-minded people to provide software that will serve the administrative needs of many types of non-profit organizations. We believe that the open source development model can help provide an environment that encourages open collaboration and sharing of development resources between missions organizations. Kardia is the first offspring of this idea (with the development of The Christian Open Development Network soon to follow). History During ICCM 2001, several people got together and discussed the current state of administrative software in missions. The general consensus was that the best solution had only provided perhaps 75% of the desired functionality, and the resources poured into these types of projects were enormous. The smaller missions organizations cannot even afford to make this type of attempt. We asked, "What can be done about this?" Learning from past endeavors, we decided to start a project called Kardia which would be a place to pool our resources and create something that can work for all of us. One of the biggest requirements was that this be built upon open standards and completely free software. What we learned from history is that basing a large project like this upon proprietary software generally is not a good idea. We heard many stories of projects that were eventually dumped because a company went out of business, or they started charging enormous amounts of money for their software upgrades. We vowed to not let this happen. Fall and winder of 2001 were spent trying to orient ourselves with this project. A lot of prayer was poured into it, and things started working out. During a missions conference at Taylor University, Tim Young and Greg Beeley talked with several professors and started a class for the spring semester to study the open source development model, and using Kardia as a case study. This class helped lay the groundwork for the project and the students have been very instrumental in getting Kardia up off the ground. To bring this up to date, one year after the idea was formed, a working demo is being created using Centrallix as the back-end platform. This demo will be presented at ICCM 2002 in Upland, Indiana at Taylor University. In October of 2006, work began to replace Action International Ministries' donation and payroll management system. During 2008, Lightsys interfaced with ACTION's legacy system, and both systems began to run side-by-side. In 2009, the office moved to Kardia from the legacy system. The goal of Kardia is to inexpensively ease office operation managment in missions organizations, and to package Kardia such that it robustly meets the needs to missions organizations, and to be easily distributed and adopted. Kardia is open to additional developers who are interested in making a positive impact in missions through software. |
