...and on...

Update so far: after some thoughts of offshoring the development to India it turns out that Steve has returned to the UK for a while and has some time available to do some more work on the project. Hurrah.

Here's what's happening now:

* All (re)approved the idea of activating the company; to confirm, that means we all have 25% each
* Everyone is happy to invest the required cash to get the proof-of-concept on the net.
* We need to have some mechanism in place for recognising effort - i.e. if for some reason one of us can't contribute time and/or money then we can't "Carry" them forward indefinitely and so that person's shareholding must be diluted somehow. Similarly, if someone is carrying the whole project for long periods of time then that also needs to be recognised somehow.
* we need something in the M&A about the existing shareholders getting first refusal on sale of shares.
* Offshore development: as Steve is offering to spend time getting the Portal on the net then we'll postpone that.

Roles:
Everyone: pitch in ideas - technical, business, branding, anything and everything
Jeremy: Company secretary, marketing and business development, "accountant"
Mike: DBA, database design, java development, reporting
Richard: CEO, strategy, technical development: java development and portal admin, domain registrar admin
Steve: CTO, system admin, development framework advisor, java and portal development

Next Steps
Jeremy & I are meeting next week to hand over company papers so he can activate it; Steve is figuring out the portal implementation issues - especially the Glassfish/MySQL installation and configuration of the standard email and chat portlets, we will all write cheques or transfer cash electronically to the new bank account and then we'll procure the server so that I can start to change the domain DNSs, etc. and Steve can deploy the portal. Mike will have some time in around June/July to produce the database design for the first application and populate it with the pre-requisite reference data. Then we will have the hard graft to build the java applications.