volpe/posts/drafts/ims-for-co-ops.md

Motivations

• to own the means of production we also need to own the software
• community ownership of the infrastructure that powers it is important for stability
• needs to support customer and worker co-ops
• federation of co-op systems
• member only co-op are how small businesses should exist in a community

Design Requirements

Crawl

• Member only co-ops
• Handle looking up products
  • SKU numbers
  • PLU numbers
  • UPC numbers
• Non fixed quantity products
  • what units do we use
• IMS and POS system need to be able to operate independently
• Track orders per account
• generate inventory reports
• Internationalization of UI
  • Accessability for users of all backgrounds

Walk

• inventory velocity reports
• opt in item location lookup
• integration into other systems to order supplies
• track costs vs revenue
  • broken down store wide
  • broken down per member
• accept payments for items
  • cash
  • multiple currencies?
  • crypto???

Run

• federation
• Single Sign On
• accept card payments for items
  • the big processors
  • whats europe doing nowadays
  • SNAP/EBT
• Product requests

Fly

• nix config with a software suite that sets up all of the systems (POS, IMS, auth, member matrix server)

Design plan

systems:

• card payment bridge
  • talking to credit card readers is complex and needs drivers. We should make some kind bridge software that runs on a very very cheap device like a pi or something.
• payment system
  • payment module should be separate from point of sale module so we can keep the concept of pricing as separate as we can
  • track cost of items
• point of sale system
  • in charge of tracking what items are a part of what order
  • requests preview information from payment module
  • forwards order session to payment system
  • send completed orders to inventory management system
• inventory management system
  • track what is in stock
    • track estimation of how much product exists
    • track shrink rates
    • track product velocity
  • get messages from point of sale system to update inventory amounts
  • handle audits
• finances system
  • track revenue vs expenses
  • forecast budget
• authentication system (how do we track member id numbers relating to this?)
• web portal
• matrix server