Re: Friends-of-GNOME database [Re: Modifying GNOME-About to count users]

[Luis Villa <luis villa gmail com>]

On 7/12/05, Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com> wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-07-12 at 21:47 +1000, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> > <quote who="Tim Ney, GNOME Foundation">
> >
> > > Following up on the discussion about counting GNOME users and running a db
> > > of Friends of GNOME (FOG) - [gnome-infrastructure added here.]  Any system
> > > that can import comma or tab delimited data might work for managing the
> > > FOG information - names, contact info, comments, donation amount and
> > > date(s) and would be a good starting point.
> > >
> > > Does it make sense to use mysql since that is already on a gnome server?
> > > Anyone from gnome-infrastructure team interested in working on such a
> > > project?
> >
> > We need more than just the database server, we need an application to manage
> > it. Data in CSV format will be simple to massage once we've determined the
> > correct application to use - it's very likely that it'll be Drupal with the
> > CivicSpace modules.
>
> I think two somewhat different things have gotten conflated here.
> I'm not sure I've completely followed all the threads of the
> "GNOME-About" discussion, but it seems to have evolved from a discussion
> of some sort of automated ping to a way to allow users to register
> with GNOME.

There was a suggestion that automated ping was not kosher, so it
evolved into opt-in provision of data. From there, it got to FOG. Not
justifying the merge, just giving the history :)

> But for the GNOME foundation we need something different - we need to
> track the people that we "do business" with...

<snip long, essentially correct list of requirements>

> While I don't know much about Drupal, it doesn't seem very related to
> this sort of "customer database". 

Drupal was brought up because some non-profits in the political space
with a very, very similar set of requirements are writing a set of
drupal plugins (called civicspace) to meet these requirements.
Reinventing the wheel when people with way more experience than we
have are already providing open code to solve our problems seems
silly, though I've not yet tried to install their stuff and can't
speak to the robustness of it.

Luis