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Building Reservations System - Volunteers Needed
I’ve been asked by the Heber Valley Camp (HVC) to help them build a reservations system. HVC is an 8500 acre camp east of Heber Utah that is used by young women’s groups from the LDS Church. The camp also allows family camping when it’s not being used for it’s primary purpose. Right now the camp has six separate camps that can accommodate around 350 people each. When it’s complete that number could go to as high as 21 camps. As you can imagine, scheduling something like this isn’t something you can do with a spreadsheet since the camp deals with 1000’s of reservations per year.
The current Web site has a reservations system that “kind of grew up.” Consequently, it is rather brittle and hard to change. My goal is to build a reservations system that is tailored to meet the unique needs of the camp, but flexible enough to allow for changing policies as the camp grows and matures.
I’m looking for volunteers who would like to help build such a system. The current pilot is in Rails and it may grow up to be the final system, so I’m particularly interested in people who know Rails or are fluent in Web programming in another system (e.g. PHP/MySQL) and would like to learn Rails (and Ruby, naturally). I also need the services of a few system administrator types.
If you’d like to help, you can volunteer by adding your name to the mailing list (Google Group) using the form on the HVC Development page. The development page also has links to the wiki where we’re documenting design decisions, the code repository (Subversion), and the bug tracking system (Mantis). After you’ve added you name to the list, contact me and I’ll give you necessary permissions, etc.
I’m planning on officially launching the effort with a orientation meeting and hackathon on Saturday in January.
Posted by windley on November 26, 2006 12:01 PM
Comment from Stacy at November 26, 2006 10:51 PM
Do you think the benefits of implementing this new system will outway the costs and give you a competitive advantage?
Comment from dave at November 27, 2006 9:53 AM
Why not just use Zimbra? It has multiple calendars, checks for availability, is web-based, etc. Better yet, why not just use Yahoo or Google Calendars?
It seems silly to reinvent a custom app here, at least from the description I've read so far.
Comment from Phil Windey at November 27, 2006 10:48 AM
Well, given that we're a not-for-profit, a competitive advantage isn't what we're after. What we're trying to achieve is making it easy for campers to make reservations and volunteers to manage the camp.
Keep in mind that a self-service reservations system is NOT simply a calendar, although calendars play a roll. We're certainly interested in re-using whatever we can.
In addition to calendars, there are rules about what's available when, payments, keeping track of users, etc.
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