ImprovingApp: Domain

The Improving App is a platform that is intended to unify the various commerce and calendaring activities for complex organizations such as high schools. We find that often these organizations have many pressing needs that take priority over these “minor” details. Events and the vending that happens at them often bring sorely needed revenue into the organization, are neglected and become subject to conflict and infighting, have high organizational leadership turnover (think PTO President or Booster Club President), and leaves administration frustrated, confused, and distrusting. Because of this distrust, many processes and controls are instituted that frustrate and complicate volunteer leadership that ultimately prevent them from doing a better job for the school.

Beyond the obvious need that a platform such as this fills, we also think that it is a tremendous asset to provide students at a high school real-world business experience. Imagine if a group of teachers, administrators, and staff became a board of directors that selected each year, from the student body, a CEO, CTO, CMO, CFO, etc. Imagine these students leaving high school with a resume that, beyond a high school diploma, details their involvement with these businesses; how they increased attendance at school events, how they improved margin, how they attracted more sponsors, how they managed staff, how they improved efficiency, how they planned inventory, and so on.

ImprovingApp is a reference application for YoppWorks/Improving. It demonstrates the very best of Reactive Architecture, Domain Driven Design (DDD), Distributed Computing, Cloud Native Deployment, CI/CD, Agile Development, RIDDL, Test Automation, and Actor Systems (Akka, Vert.X, Spring, etc.). Inherint in this reference application is the ability to stand up demo sites quickly so that we can demonstrate to potential clients the advantages of YoppWorks/Improving preferred technologies and practices. We should be able to demonstrate clearly through real life metrics (number of users, number of orders processed, number of organizations supported, elasticity, etc.) the value of the platform and the technologies and processes used to implement it. We should be able to demonstrate through chaos engineering the responsiveness, resiliance, and elasticity of the technologies used in implementing the platform. The reference application will also be used in training curricula on the above technologies and processes for YoppWorks/Improving.

We think this platform could further be monitized (beyond the secondary education market) to include collegiate environments, professional athletics, grass roots events like farmer’s markets and craft fairs, food trucks, on-line ordering for restaurants, merch sales for concerts, and so on. The key unifying characteristics include one or more of the following:

• e-commerce activity where delivery of purchased goods is taken in person,
• there is a series of events that must be calendared and coordinated,
• audiences to engage (sponsorships, advertised promotions, information shared, and so on),
• or staff to be sheduled and coordinated.

The languages, frameworks, and platforms used to develop ImprovingApp include the following:

• UI:
  • Framework: Dart/Flutter
  • Targets: PWA, Android, iOS, Mac, Windows
  • CDN: Google
• BE:
  • Languages: Scala, Java, Python, JavaScript (TypeScript and other variants), F#, C#
  • Actor Models: Akka, Akka.NET, Kalix (Akka Serverless)
  • Design: Polyglot Microservices, Possibly with Node?
  • Messaging: gRPC/ProcolBuffers, Google Pub/Sub
  • Runtime: GraalVM/11, Akka.NET 6
  • Infrastructure: GKE Kubernetes
  • Databases: Cassandra for Event Sourcing, Postgres/MySQL/Neo4J for views/projections

To summarize the motivations behind the development of the ImprovingApp:

• A full open-source, cloud-native, reactive microservices-based demonstrantion for What it is that we do at Improving Ottawa.
• The basis for all reactive, actor, development, DevOps, etc. training courses Improving Ottawa offers
• Improving-Ottawa’s conscious capitalism contribution
• 24X7 running sales demonstration application
• Demonstrate solutions to complex problems: rolling upgrades, rapid continuous deployment, agile development, sharding, reactive, …
• A continuously evolving context for exploring new technologies (WEb 3.0, cryptocurrency, NFT, Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI), IoT, Chaos Engineering/Chaos Monkey, Machine Learning, Predictive Analytics, Recommender Systems). Also a context to explore solutions to address evolving regulatory and compliance issues like privacy law (GDPR, PIPEDA, CCPA, etc.)
• At least self-sustaining non-profit results (but not antagonistic to making a profit!)
• Utilize bench effectively
• Provides many examples of design/architecture patterns
• Peer-reviewed high-quality software
• An example that promotes FOMO and dissipates FUD

MVP: A fully fledged “demo only” version that does not support real CC transactions, nor real events, but simulates such things to provide a very capable training/demonstration application. This should be centered around a fictitions organization (name needed. Ideas that have been proposed include Hogwarts, Whoville High, etc.) that operates in demo mode, and separately from “real” or “live” organizations and their events.

Conscious Capitalism There are many threads of Conscious Capitalism built into this application, particularly when applied to a secondary education context (or even post-secondary). Here are some ideas

• This application is a learning platform.
  • Students wanting to learn how modern applications are built could analyze this application as a case study.
  • Students could be encouraged to extend and customize the application - increasing their learning and application
  • Students could look at data generated by the application to learn about marketing, supply chain management, commerce, event management, communications, etc.
• This application is real
  • It manages functioning businesses that operate under the Root Organization
  • These businesses are limited in scope so damages from mismanagement are limited.
  • School Administrators (board of directors) could appoint from the student body each year a CEO, CFO, CMO, CTO to manage these businesses with oversight from the board.

---
title: Map For Domain 'ImprovingApp'
init:
    theme: dark
flowchart:
    defaultRenderer: dagre
    width: 100%
    useMaxWidth: true
    securityLevel: loose
---

flowchart TB
  classDef default fill:#666,stroke:black,stroke-width:3px,color:white;
  classDef UserInterface_class color:white,stroke-width:3px;
  classDef CommandLine_class color:white,stroke-width:3px;
  classDef AccountingContext_class color:white,stroke-width:3px;
  classDef Calendars_class color:white,stroke-width:3px;
  classDef MemberContext_class color:white,stroke-width:3px;
  classDef OrganizationContext_class color:white,stroke-width:3px;
  classDef OrderContext_class color:white,stroke-width:3px;
  classDef TenantContext_class color:white,stroke-width:3px;
  classDef StoreContext_class color:white,stroke-width:3px;
  classDef ProductContext_class color:white,stroke-width:3px;
  classDef Commerce_class color:white,stroke-width:3px;
  classDef Vendor_class color:white,stroke-width:3px;
  classDef EventReservationProjections_class color:white,stroke-width:3px;
  classDef AllIdsProjections_class color:white,stroke-width:3px;
  classDef LocationsReservationsProjections_class color:white,stroke-width:3px;
  classDef OrganizationsForMembersAttendingEventsProjections_class color:white,stroke-width:3px;
  classDef MembersAttendingEventsForAnOrganizationProjection_class color:white,stroke-width:3px;
  classDef TestGateway_class color:white,stroke-width:3px;
  subgraph 'Domain 'ImprovingApp''
    direction TB
    UserInterface((Application 'UserInterface'))
    CommandLine((Application 'CommandLine'))
    AccountingContext((Context 'AccountingContext'))
    Calendars((Context 'Calendars'))
    MemberContext((Context 'MemberContext'))
    OrganizationContext((Context 'OrganizationContext'))
    OrderContext((Context 'OrderContext'))
    TenantContext((Context 'TenantContext'))
    StoreContext((Context 'StoreContext'))
    ProductContext((Context 'ProductContext'))
    Commerce((Context 'Commerce'))
    Vendor((Context 'Vendor'))
    EventReservationProjections((Context 'EventReservationProjections'))
    AllIdsProjections((Context 'AllIdsProjections'))
    LocationsReservationsProjections((Context 'LocationsReservationsProjections'))
    OrganizationsForMembersAttendingEventsProjections((Context 'OrganizationsForMembersAttendingEventsProjections'))
    MembersAttendingEventsForAnOrganizationProjection((Context 'MembersAttendingEventsForAnOrganizationProjection'))
    TestGateway((Context 'TestGateway'))
    ImprovingApp-->|contains|UserInterface((Application 'UserInterface'))
    ImprovingApp-->|contains|CommandLine((Application 'CommandLine'))
    ImprovingApp-->|contains|AccountingContext((Context 'AccountingContext'))
    ImprovingApp-->|contains|Calendars((Context 'Calendars'))
    ImprovingApp-->|contains|MemberContext((Context 'MemberContext'))
    ImprovingApp-->|contains|OrganizationContext((Context 'OrganizationContext'))
    ImprovingApp-->|contains|OrderContext((Context 'OrderContext'))
    ImprovingApp-->|contains|TenantContext((Context 'TenantContext'))
    ImprovingApp-->|contains|StoreContext((Context 'StoreContext'))
    ImprovingApp-->|contains|ProductContext((Context 'ProductContext'))
    ImprovingApp-->|contains|Commerce((Context 'Commerce'))
    ImprovingApp-->|contains|Vendor((Context 'Vendor'))
    ImprovingApp-->|contains|EventReservationProjections((Context 'EventReservationProjections'))
    ImprovingApp-->|contains|AllIdsProjections((Context 'AllIdsProjections'))
    ImprovingApp-->|contains|LocationsReservationsProjections((Context 'LocationsReservationsProjections'))
    ImprovingApp-->|contains|OrganizationsForMembersAttendingEventsProjections((Context 'OrganizationsForMembersAttendingEventsProjections'))
    ImprovingApp-->|contains|MembersAttendingEventsForAnOrganizationProjection((Context 'MembersAttendingEventsForAnOrganizationProjection'))
    ImprovingApp-->|contains|TestGateway((Context 'TestGateway'))
  end
  class UserInterface UserInterface_class
  class CommandLine CommandLine_class
  class AccountingContext AccountingContext_class
  class Calendars Calendars_class
  class MemberContext MemberContext_class
  class OrganizationContext OrganizationContext_class
  class OrderContext OrderContext_class
  class TenantContext TenantContext_class
  class StoreContext StoreContext_class
  class ProductContext ProductContext_class
  class Commerce Commerce_class
  class Vendor Vendor_class
  class EventReservationProjections EventReservationProjections_class
  class AllIdsProjections AllIdsProjections_class
  class LocationsReservationsProjections LocationsReservationsProjections_class
  class OrganizationsForMembersAttendingEventsProjections OrganizationsForMembersAttendingEventsProjections_class
  class MembersAttendingEventsForAnOrganizationProjection MembersAttendingEventsForAnOrganizationProjection_class
  class TestGateway TestGateway_class