OPA (Online Proposal Appraisal) was originally designed and developed in 1999/2000 using Cold Fusion by Bellanet International Secretariat in partnership with the MINGA program of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Canada . The idea for OPA emerged to support a MINGA project initiative for small grant programs. MINGA and Bellanet agreed on the benefits of creating a generic, Open Source application that could also serve a wide variety of other purposes. The Cold Fusion version 2.0 of OPA was completed in 2001 in collaboration with the GDN Awards Program . This implementation of OPA has continued to serve GDNet for 10 years. The current site is: http://opa.gdnet.org/ KiNcite then ported OPA to PHP in 2001/2002 in collaboration with Bellanet and Public Works and Government Services Canada (PWGSC). Bellanet made further refinements in September 2002. The NewJersey/Toronto company Omoli took the initiative to port OPA-ColdFusion/Access to OPA-J2EE/MySQL under the GNU-GPL, and also provides several additional modules: http://www.omoli.com/ http://www.omoli.com/news.htm This conversion was completed in November 2003, and shared back with the Canadian Government. It was picked up then by a wider diversity of organizations. In 2009 Treasury Board Secretariat of the Canadian Government contracted Gatineau-based “Centre for Research and Experimental Development in Informatics Libre” (CREDIL) http://www.credil.org/ to run a small contest in which three prizes of $1000 were awared for the best improvements to the OPA-Java 2 version of the software. The effort was also promoted internationally by the Free Software Foundation http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/credil-contest-2009. CONTACTS: Joseph Potvin Original Co-Architect and Product Co-Manager of OPA (1999-2001), Bellanet International Secretariat Currently: Coodinator, Intellectual Resources Canada (IRCan), Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat +1 613-889-6747 or Mark Faul Cold Fusion programmer, Co-Architect of OPA (1999-2004) Program Officer, Bellanet International Secretariat Currently: Program Manager of E-Media at City of Ottawa, Canada. +1 613-580-2424 x12808 The original client team for OPA v1.0 included the following: Daniel Buckles, PhD. Detailed Business Requirements, Usability and Design (1999-2001) Senior Program Specialist, International Development Research Centre +1 (613) 236-6163 ext 2358 F. Brian Davy Ph.D. Usability and Design (1999-2001) Biodiversity Team Leader, International Development Research Centre +1 (613) 236-6163 ext 2540 Gilles Cliche Contextual Business Requirements, Usability and Design (1999-2001) Program Officer, International Development Research Centre +1 (613) 236-6163 ext 2061 Eiichiro Kawabe Usability and Design (2001) Policy Coordination Division, Minister's Secretariat, Cabinet Office (Japan) + The following worked on the PHP port: Contacts for OPA-PHP Jako Jellema PHP Development Coordinator (2001-2002) KiNcite +31 15 2850318 Sarah Kerr PHP programmer (2002) Technical Officer, Bellanet International Secretariat +1 (613) 236-6163 ext 2192 81-3-3581-3513 Contacts for OPA-Java Original port to J2EE: Obi Anizor, Chief Software Engineer http://www.omoli.com http://www.onlineproposalmanagement.com Toll Free: 1-866-90-OMOLI Phone: 770-997-4278 Cell: 905-301-1985 Canadian Government Lead on OPA: Joseph Potvin Coordinator, Intellectual Resources Canada (IRCan) Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat Ottawa, Canada K1A 0R5 Joseph.Potvin@tbs-sct.gc.ca Telephone 613-941-4626 Mobile 613-889-6747 Recent Improvements to OPA-Java: CREDIL - Centre de recherche et dévelopement experimental en informartique libre F3018-283 Alexandre Taché Gatineau, Québec, Canada, J9A 1L8 Téléphone +1 613 693-0684 Christian R. Meloche, crm@credil.org, ext. 3201 Michael C. Richardson, mcr@credil.org, ext. 3510 Andrew Clunis, aclunis@credil.org, ext3512