Church management software

One thing I'm looking to do is to make this blog a little more technically oriented. My other blog is really an Interactive Intelligence thing - the site is clientcom.blogspot.com, and it's named after the Interactive product ClientCOM; so it really seems most sensible to keep posts to that blog on ClientCOM - tips and tricks for using it, etc. Unfortunately, soon after I started that blog, I stopped focusing on ClientCOM in order to do other things, so it has been dark for quite a while. I'd like this blog to be about some technical work I'm doing, as well as the books and plays I'm currently seeing. (Once again - blog categories. C'mon, Blogger!)

So my church is looking for a better way to handle benevolence requests. These are requests that come in from people who need charity - say, $100 for fuel in the winter, or help with gas to visit a sick mother. I was casting about for things I might do as a Micro-ISV, so I thought I might be able to help out - and perhaps, if it works out well for this one church, be able to sell the application to others as well. That's a bit of a ways off, though.

So I'm tackling this project; more or less on my own as far as the design goes. I don't think my "customers" are going to be too demanding, so I'll have to keep on top of them to make sure that the application is actually useful to them. I'll be creating the design and requirements, etc., myself, so I think this is a good application to use some agile methodologies on. Specifically, this project will have: Test-driven development, frequent iterations, and easy updates.

So what are the requirements? If I ask the pastor, I'll get an easy answer: A way to enter benevolence requests online, without paper forms. A surprising addition, to my mind, is: A way to track down resources that might be able to fulfill a request. What this is, basically, is an algorithm for finding places that will take vouchers for gas; maybe food banks that could help a hungry person, etc. To my mind, these are such different goals that I'll just be ignoring this one, until I get further along in the development. So I'll concentrate first on the paperless form.

So the next question is, as a techie, what requirements do I see that underlie this prime requirement?

• A backing store
• Data entry screens
• Reports

Seem to be the minimum. I'll think about how I'll be fulfilling these requirements next time.

Writing again

I've been so busy lately that I haven't bothered to write anything. But today I fired up Bandit to catch up a little bit on http://scoble.weblogs.com/, and I remembered what it's all about. It's about keeping in touch. It's about exposing a little bit of yourself to the world. Blogging is an interesting feedback loop. You write something interesting, and people read what you have to say. But if you don't write anything interesting, no one will visit your site; so it's about buzz, it's about attention. There's lots of interesting things going on in the blogosphere, and no one has time to keep up with all of it, but to keep in touch you absolutely have to do one thing: write. I think blogs, along with wikis, are the most important new internet development in years, and I'm trying to figure out where I fit in. I should be writing about work. I should be writing about church. I should be writing about interesting things I find on the internet. I should be writing about Extreme Programming, or C#, or Ultimate Frisbee, or anything I know something about.

There's some similarities between blogging and Extreme Programming, I think. They both rely on a tight and fast feedback loop. They both support rapid and easy change. They stress communication as a core value. And maybe most importantly, they both require a lot of discipline. It's easy to write code, hard to remember to write a test every time I make change. It's easy to start a blog, hard to remember to keep it going and keep it interesting.

So maybe this is my latest attempt to regain the discipline. I'll try to write some interesting things. We'll see if it works :)