Technology Committee Meeting
May 13, 2003

Present: Steve Boston, John Rollins, Jan Paxton, Russ Worthington, Michael Francaviglia, Robert Harwood, Susan Robinson, Johanna Young, Nina Nickelson

Next Meeting: Tuesday, September 9, 2003 -John Cooks, 6:30 PM at Christ Church

Minutes

1. Nina came to the meeting specifically so that we could discuss Michael's database dream. Michael wants to get one large database that can be used by all of the diocesan offices to do all the things they want to do. He wants it to up on the server, which is now possible because the new server is running MySequel (soon to be updated to version 4).

Russ thinks that what he uses at Cross Roads gets at the idea of what Michael wants, although it is not the answer, but an example of what can be done. Russ's program is CampTraks and it is Access based, created by the Lutherans.

Rob, Nina and Russ batted ideas back and forth. Rob has lots of "stuff" that might help. The bottom line is that the project is do-able, but who will do what when. The beginning will be interviews with everyone at Mullberry Street to create a stack of index cards that will enable someone to lay out the database format and structure the fields.

Nina says that then comes the writing of the Cold Fusion code and making everything controlled by user id and then generate pages. A later step is to re-code web pages into cold fusion to access the database. This is a big project and will take at least a year.

Robert knows how to do interviews and says that Dreamweaver NuDev will write cold fusion.

Nina suggests that we aim at a core set of data so that when people ask for the moon, the task will still be within reason.

2.