Pariyatti Mobile App Spike

Please treat this document as the hub of all other documentation for the Mobile App project. If a new piece of documentation emerges (or is discovered) which cannot or should not be committed to version control, please link to it from this README.

Important Links

Statement of Purpose

Pariyatti has a large repository of texts, audio, and video available for free but currently lacks an effective mechanism for knowledge management and discovery. The Pariyatti Mobile App will serve to provide a broad spectrum of seekers access to this body of knowledge.

Process

The App has thus far followed a highly-distributed mode of discovery, design, project management, operations, and development. The existing Pariyatti Staff will provide long-term guidance to the project. As such, a long-term view of the project must always be a priority for any contributor. Whenever decisions are made and design/development occurs, please keep in mind this question: "who will be responsible for this in 5 - 10 years?" Wherever and whenever possible, involve Pariyatti's long-term staff in discussions and ensure they have access to (and ultimate control of) all documents, code, accounts, passwords, keys, etc.

We will build the app and any corresponding server-side components as Free & Open Software. This is done for two reasons: (1) ethical software practices, in the interest of strengthening sila throughout the project and (2) smooth collaboration between various volunteers/servers/staff with different levels of commitment.

Roughly, the process we plan to follow (subject to a great deal of upcoming change, no doubt) is:

  1. Project kick-off / inception
  2. Legacy software discovery & replacement (ongoing)
  3. Create contact list
  4. Create glossary
  5. Capture open questions
  6. Answer those open questions with the team
  7. Spike front-end frameworks (ReactNative, Flutter, and maybe Cordova)
  8. Spike back-end API: do we need to aggregate CMS+ecommerce+feeds+etc to unify the API for the app?
  9. Create front-end and back-end repos in https://github.com/pariyatti and begin development