We got a lot of positive feedback on this over in the CivicSpace community, so I'm cross-posting here-- please join us if you can on IRC to chat about eCommerce/Donations within Drupal/CivicSpace at 5pm Pacific Time today (Wednesday) before the general CivicSpace IRC meeting at 5:30pm.

It's at #civicspace on irc.freenode.org

We're holding this chat because a lot of people have recently and independently approached us with problems and/or proposed solutions to various eCommerce issues for CivicSpace, and we want to get everyone talking to each other.

The immediate goals of the chat are to get a status check on everything that is going on in the realm of Drupal/CivicSpace + (payment processing, donations, auctions, eCommerce, etc.), and determine what if anything CivicSpace can do to facilitate collaboration going forward (e.g.: mailing list, how-to knowledgebase on CSL.org, bundling modules in to CivicSpace release, regular IRC meetings, or perhaps nothing at all, etc.). More context below:

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There has been a good deal of discussion of late on this list about various flavors of transacting money in the context of using a CivicSpace site... donation processing /eCommerce/ ticketing/ auctions, etc. And no wonder-- it's the lifeblood of many a non-profit and all political campagns, and the primary revenue stream of the online organizing ASPs of the world like Kintera ($200MM market cap and falling, by the way). We want CivicSpace to help make it easier and less expensive for non-profits and campaigns to get their lifeblood, and a better experience with more control for individuals who are interested in supporting their preferred communities, organizations, and candidates.

In addition to our work on enabling CRM infratructure(objectledge.org/confluence/display/CRM/CRM+Project+One+Pager) and a couple of relevant existing Drupal modules (www.drupal.org/project/ecommerce) and Drupal-powered ASP services (www.donorge.org), a number of exciting independent projects (www.donationpal.org, www.benefitevents.com) have emerged that have the potential to make CivicSpace a powerful platform for online commerce within online communities.

And yet many people working on these related solutions are not aware of or are not keeping tabs on or are not leveraging one another's work.

And it remains challenging for organizations considering adopting CivicSpace to figure out how they can conduct eCommerce with CivicSpace and within what costs, capabilities, and timeframes.

So, we'd like to assay your interest in setting up a working group to focus specifically on eCommerce for CivicSpace, with two key goals: bringing the capabilities we all need to the platform in the most timely and effective manner possible; and helping people to educate CivicSpace users about how to best meet their eCommerce needs in the meantime through the integration of 3rd party services and the like.

Please bounce back with answers to these questions:

1) Would you like to see such an ad-hoc working group formed?
2) What would you like to see such a group do?
3) How would you like to see such a group operate?