[TriLUG] OT: application development for Jacksonville, NC "Christmas Cheer" program

[Joseph Tate]

There's a need in Jacksonville, NC for an application to help manage
their Christmas Cheer program.  This is a program to link
donors/sponsors with needy families to provide them some sort of help
at Christmastime (food, toys for kids, etc.).  The group is an
affiliate of the Marine Corps Toys for Tots program.

They currently have a very manual system built using the 1992 version
of Q&A (DOS based and all the fun that entails), but would like
something multi-user, and remote accessible.  Their current system is
also archaic and only known/usable by one guy, despite his efforts to
train other users.

I'm thinking that a few of us could put a new system together for them
in a couple of weekend sprints on a LNPPy* stack if we work together.
If there's an existing project that does a good portion of what we
need, we'll just sprint on that project, customizing it for the
Jacksonville organization (if anyone knows of something, please let me
know).  The resulting code would be released using the GPL or other
OSI license as appropriate.  We'd hold those sprints some time in the
next few months.

The architecture that I think will work best is a central database
(PostgreSQL) hosted at webfaction or similar, and also hosting a web
service.  Then two views would be built, an evaluation/reporting view
as an DHTML/AJAX web-UI, and a cross-platform rich client for data
entry to maximize the efficiency of data input.

We have a few testers and html-designer guys through a contact of
mine, but I'm looking for some volunteers to fill out the ranks:

Sys Admin(s) to set up and optimize the database, set up backups, set
up a live demo, etc.
Web stylists/graphics artists to make the forms/reports pretty.
Perl/Python scripters to handle data import from the old system (DBF
or CSV), converting it to the new schema as required.
Documentation writers (keep a wiki page during development of what
steps are needed to get a working environment set up, help come up
with the taxonomy and wordsmith text in the application, write inline
help documentation for the final application)
As many programmers as are willing to donate some time.  Need not be
an expert programmer, or even know Python, just be willing to learn.

If you're interested in helping with this, reply back (off list) with
weekend availability during Jan/Feb/March as well as what kind of work
you'd like to do to help.

* nginx, Python and PostgreSQL vs. Apache, MySQL and PHP.

-- 
Joseph Tate
Personal e-mail: jtate AT dragonstrider DOT com
Web: http://www.dragonstrider.com