A Bit of History

Post date: Jul 21, 2014 12:33:30 PM

From: Allan Kugel [mailto:kugel@rci.rutgers.edu]

Sent: Sunday, July 20, 2014 3:40 PM

To: The Minstrel

Cc: g_otto@comcast.net; 'George Otto'; volunteers@folkproject.org; lorif10@yahoo.com; lwfalco@optonline.net; chrisriemer@verizon.net; MarkSchaffer100@gmail.com; jean.scully@verizon.net; ceciliazeimetz@yahoo.com; joannelcronin@optonline.net; John Lamb

Subject: Re: Volunteer Schedule

George --

A bit of history:

There was a meeting about 1 1/2 years ago about creating a web-based volunteer management system. One reason that this didn't move forward is that subsequently the web team members had reduced availability at the same time that some urgent-seeming web maintenance projects popped up (including handing last summers' site break-in and its aftermath).

Because this was a "big-chunk" project (several large-ish new pieces that all needed to be there for the system to work), we've been handling more urgent or smaller projects that either had to be handled or could be handled in the time available.

Assuming that the rate of big-impact maintenance goes back down to more-normal levels, I'd expect that restarting this project would be discussed at the next web team meeting, probably sometime between late August and the end of October. Some of this likely discussion might have been about whether the minstrel volunteer people still wanted this, because we hadn't heard anything in a while.

As far as something using the current FileMaker database, if it doesn't require support from the web team, and it makes life easier, that might be fine. The current website use LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) technology, which I know reasonably well, but I don't know proprietary systems like FileMaker. I'd caution against passing database files back and forth through Dropbox, but there may be some way of using Dropbox-hosted database files directly without uploads/downloads, as if those were on the machines of the various users.

Anyhow, if our workload doesn't jump up again, and if having multi-user volunteer management is worth >$500, maybe we can bump up the priority for the project.