[software] Design Decisions

[Dave Rolsky]

On Thu, 30 Oct 2008, Bradley M. Kuhn wrote:

> Dave Rolsky wrote at 11:22 (EDT) on Wednesday:
>
>> Similarly, I'm not targeting organizations with complex financial
>> arrangements like an umbrella organization would have.
>
> If I'm able to clear my schedule later this year or early next, would
> you be willing to accept early patches that push Rapport2 into this
> direction?
>
> (I think I might be able to dig up some Perl chops out of my bag of
> tricks and be able to help, for the sake of scratching *my* itch. ;)

Definitely maybe. My #1 goal is still to make a really excellent app for 
my target market (which isn't umbrella orgs yet). That means spending a 
lot of time on the UI and workflow, and _not_ adding in rough features. If 
a feature is in the UI, I want it to be as polished as possible (for a 
beta release, of course).

However, I'd definitely be interested in hearing more about umbrella org 
requirements, and if I can, I'd like to make sure that the database design 
doesn't rule out umbrella org features in the future, even if there's no 
UI for it in the initial release.

I already have a notion of donation targets, which let you associate a 
donation with various funds. I suspect that's not enough however.

Another thing that might help is that I have a notion of an "account". 
This is an account as in "the people who are paying for the service", and 
an account will have 1+ users. So The Software Freedom Conservancy would 
be an account, and Brad Kuhn would be a user under said account.

Accounts also have contacts, which in turn have donations.

I imagine that if an account could in turn have "sub-accounts", that might 
satisfy many of the needs an umbrella org has. Users in the master account 
could browse contacts & donations for all sub-accounts, and could do 
reporting on one, some, or all sub-accounts together.

Adding this in the future would not be _too_ difficult.

But right now I'm just kind of guessing what an umbrella org might need. 
I've never been involved in running one myself.


-dave

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