I’ve just went through the 3 days of conference stream online. Although I feel quite confident of the direction being taken, I am still quite unsure about the time it will take to get the development wheel really rolling.
I confess of having an idea of something similar to open betas since when I started following ERPNext about a year ago, but never expected it to be put in use. However I think now, might just be the right time for it. I would like to present another related idea before the community-
Let’s organize feature requests into 3 categories -
- Framework Level
- Domain/process Specific
- Customer Specific
I propose to having a mechanism to address these separately.
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For Framework Level - These include features that are core to the system, like addition of dynamic reporting (including charts ,groupings and BI), Improved customisations and other additions to bench, offline-online and multi-database sync capabilities, etc.
I think frappe team and foundation supported developers would be the best people to implement these. (of-course public beta like system to develop these will be great) -
Domain and process specific Apps - One of the things I noticed at the conference and otherwise on forums is that there are a lot of users willing to contribute, only handicapped by their programming skills (myself included). I’ve been wishing for just this little more from the framework.
In my opinion ERPNext has great doctype and workflow capabilities. We are 90% there, but if we just add that 10% - A GUI like odoo/flectra studio or zoho app creator. We will definitely have a lot of contributions back from end users.
In manufacturing domain for instance - I promise to share and send back ISO/quality documentation & Reports, Maintenance module, training and skill matrix, Attendance! and more.
In fact we can get this “app-creator” (apologies for using the A word) online so that every app that is created on it, is published online for the community to comment and contribute to. Something similar to a wiki for module creators. Further enhancement of apps, if required for more complex tasks could then be taken up as public betas. This could then be integrated into the core.
You could think of this as an approach to enable the vast functional resource of the community to contribute back.
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Customer Specific - ERPNext does this so well already! So as Rushabh said “scratch your own itch!”. And hopefully share your code using gist, etc.
This section is a little bit of business and marketing related, so I had to tag @JayRam @umair 
As an end user I have been trying to “market” ERPNext to my Organisation. From what I get, ERPNext is targeted at SMB’s like mine, so I think it might help everyone understand that when ERPNext is introduced for the first time to an end user like us - following will be the typical background -
- A software like Tally, Busy or quickbooks is used for accounting
- Excel (MS Office) is used for everything else including production planning , analytics ,etc.
- There will be some form of attendance monitoring system
- There will be lack of highly technical work force.
- Management will be struggling to a certain extent to scale up the traditional systems. (Opportunity)
What this means for ERPNext Community of developers and implementors?
As the saying goes - First impression is the last impression. If you can make the accounting department happy (by making there work easy), there is more than 99% chance that you will not have to bother about acquiring new customers! ERPNext has great opportunity of GST to win over customers by easing GST Report creation and reduced data entry. Just marketing ERPNext as an accounting software which can do so much more if required could be a way to acquire customers!
Nobody would mind a “license free” open source fully functional accounting software.
Add to that good analytics for management and everything that ERPNext already offers and you might have a problem of controlling the speed of community growth!