I like this discussion -- civil and yet in disagreement...cool. Dan Hanks made the following basic points (summarized):
> 1) parents can update what their kids have done This is not applicable to Boy Scouts, btw. Only Scoutmasters do this -- with 1 or 2 merit badge exceptions. > 2) leaders add their okay > 3) parents oversee what the scouts are doing > 4) Bishops can oversee progress > 5) everyone involved on the same page > 6) lax keeping correlated with having to deal with "pencil and paper" Most that I see using the computer write things down on paper and then transfer them to the computer. It's still a second step that most don't get around to taking. Any current or former Ward Clerks out there will know what I mean. Shane Hathaway made the suggestion of using strong encryption for a locally stored database and then using the central server to archive (for disaster recovery or whatever) that encrypted database, but *not* the key. Excellent suggestion -- that would resolve my concerns. Charles Fry brought up the point of unwieldy key management. Years ago, I filed some patents that address that problem (US Patent #: 6,831,982 and 7,024,395). Justin Findlay asked "Why should any of this be bigger than troop level?" That's a good question that gets back to requirements. Other than for disaster recovery, scouts moving to a new troop, or a new scoutmaster, why should any of this be on any computer other than the ward computer or the scoutmaster's computer? Despite my privacy concerns, I don't see a substantial requirement justifying the effort and expense of running a central server. Disaster recovery could be done by creating a church-wide centralized backup server. Parents can talk to the scouts and scoutmaster. What really justifies a web application allowing read / write access to a centralized database for which users and administrators will be blocked from accessing 99% of the content? Is there a church leadership access requirement other than basic reporting statistics that gets down to this level? Thomas Haws mentioned, "Nobody above the troop level is interested in the records, but centralized storage relieves a burden from the family and the Troop Committee." These were some of the comments that got my attention on this thread. >From this, it seems that a couple of things are generally desired: 1) centralized storage for disaster recovery purposes 2) ability to transfer records from one keeper to the next 3) ability to transfer records to new units 4) ability to allow the Bishop or parents to see progress 5) desire for something lower cost than TroopMaster. 6) goal of free and open source Other than posters saying that 'a web data application' would be 'really useful', these are the points that I've observed. Even excluding privacy concerns, I'm not really seeing the requirement / justification for a centralized web-accessible system. Given that, I propose two things: 1) the OSS community builds a free open source scout tracking application that runs on a stand-alone computer, that incorporates a good import/export function, that integrates with Excel or other office products, etc. Windows is the most common platform, but cross-platform portability should be addressed from the start. Something like Java Web Start could even be used to download an encrypted database and launch the client-side app. 2) that someone petition the church to enact a centralized backup / disaster recovery server for archiving church databases such as the troop database. Secure access and encryption for everything but the crypto keys could be archived here. I make this proposal, since this is something that the OSS community could achieve without oversight or authorization from the Church (which could take a while). The privacy issues are also minimized, since no data is being stored on web sites. Does this scaled down version of what's been discussed sound interesting? Steve _______________________________________________ Ldsoss mailing list Ldsoss@lists.ldsoss.org http://lists.ldsoss.org/mailman/listinfo/ldsoss
