Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: common meal signup and $ tracking software available

[Sharon Villines (sharon]

On Aug 21, 2007, at 12:37 PM, Ken Lewis wrote:

> That's also right. The hardware hosting prices are very reasonable.  
> Since
> I'm still early on in the process I don't have hard numbers on how  
> much I'll
> charge to support and maintain the meal tracking software. More on  
> that to
> come... I'll get the demo out to you all first.

I think having a cohousing person hosting these systems is the best  
of all possible worlds.

One of our members says cohousing attracts a lot of Yankee-Dos --  
they all want to do it themselves. Sometimes this works and sometimes  
it doesn't. Cohousing can present great opportunities for people to  
develop new skills but the emphasis has to be on the "develop." When  
it isn't, the low quality level and the dropped projects can become a  
nightmare for other residents.

I developed a database for tracking facilities maintenance and  
workshare in Filemaker Pro that was wonderful and very useful. We  
could track who was doing what, what needed to be done when, who did  
it, how much time it took, and who to call for professional services.  
The clinker was that my interest and skills stopped at developing a  
user and web interface that would allow others to use the system.  
People wanted to see the software working themselves, not just see my  
reports. (Yes, paranoia exists in cohousing.)

The program helped us get a backlog of work done and to conceptualize  
the tasks more clearly but we now have a person keeping track of  
maintenance tasks on a spreadsheet and no one keeping track of  
workshare jobs.

The online facilities management software we looked at was much more  
fully featured than we needed and thus was more expensive and more  
complex than we needed. Or it was too simple and not integrated.

Cohousing has a lot of communities out there, all reinventing the  
wheel or doing without. I'm convinced that if people like Tim and Ken  
want to take on developing software for cohousing communities that it  
would also be useful for all condominiums that are too small to have  
onsite management. Just having the software might also help them more  
toward more cohousing-like environments.

Sharon
----
Sharon Villines
Coauthor with John Buck of We the People
Consenting to a Deeper Democracy
A Guide to Sociocratic Principles and Methods
ISBN: 9780979282706
http://www.sociocracy.info