The Fruits of Unspace Labour
posted by pete on January 11th, 2010
People often ask us what we're working on, and many times it's a hard question to answer. Whether it's because it's an internal system that can't be seen on the public web, or just something that takes a long time to get rolling for any number of complex reasons, Unspace often goes for long stretches when it probably seems like we're a little quiet.
Today is not one of those times!
CommunityLend
We met Michael Garrity in 2006 and were immediately impressed with his vision for social lending in Canada. He quickly brought Colin Henderson on board and we started to build the first version of what became CommunityLend.
Almost everyone at Unspace has worked on the project since, and the single most common question we get asked is "when is [CommunityLend] going to launch?" We've always explained that it's complicated; Michael had the foresight to seek regulatory approval before launching — a gotcha that temporarily shut down US competitor Prosper and got them fined millions of dollars.
Unfortunately it took several years to get all of the regulatory hurdles behind us, and in the interim there have been many changes to the original vision as well as new faces on their team, such as Duarte "ModernMod" DaSilva, who is part of the extended Unspace family now.
CommunityLend is now in a "soft-launch" state while they prepare their full rollout. They're already getting some amazing coverage in the media, my favourite so far being "Lending goes online" in the Financial Post.
Today, Michael uploaded a great video that quickly explains what CommunityLend is all about:
United Nations Global Compact
We met Venu Keesari at our monthly Rails Pub Nite event in 2007. He was a PHP developer interested in Rails that ultimately moved to New York City and took a job with the UN Global Compact.
The United Nations Global Compact is a strategic policy initiative for businesses that are committed to aligning their operations and strategies with ten universally accepted principles in the areas of human rights, labour, environment and anti-corruption.
Cloves Carneiro Jr., Joshua Wehner and Wesley Hodgson worked with Venu over the Fall season to relaunch the UNGC website on Rails. The new site went live at the beginning of January and new features will continue to be added.
One of the reasons we're excited about the UNGC project is that it's an example of an important, highly visible site running Ruby 1.9 in production. There's still a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt about Ruby 1.9 in the wild, and we're hoping that UNGC is a milestone that helps prove 1.9 is ready for primetime. Venu is pushing hard to get Ruby (and open source) solutions deployed throughout the organization.
Congratulations to all involved, both at CommunityLend and at the UN Global Compact.