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OverviewRosterTool is a Perl/mySQL-based membership management tool for clubs and organzations, designed to benefit both the club members and the club officers. It allows a club/organization to maintain a roster that is readily available to its membership over the web. Members have the ability to update their own information (removing the need for a club officer to do so, as well as removing the time delay that would entail). All updates are instantly available. Club officers have the ability to manage the roster data, as perform many tasks related to membership renewals. Development HistoryThis tool was written to help automate the roster maintenance for the Raleigh Jaycees, a chapter of the US Jaycees, which essentially is a civic group for people aged 21-40. The club has a yearly membership, due on a 12-month cycle from when you join (not based on a Jan->Jan calendar year). Obviously, this tool may have some things that do not apply to other organizations. However, an ongoing attempt is being made to generalize the design so that it is easier to adapt for use in other organizations. Gone but not forgottenMembers have a status assigned... typically this status is 'Active'. When they leave the organization, the philosophy is not to DELETE them, but to change their status to restrict their privileges (keeping the information of Active members available only to other Active members). The plus side of this is that the club is now (by default) building an Alumni database. This can be useful for many reasons, both for the club, and the alumni. Experience has shown that for many volunteer organizations, record-keeping skills are not the best when it comes to tracking down Alumni. And you never know when you might need to get in touch with a former member. This way their information is still around, although out of respect for their privacy, you may need to go thru a club officer to get that information. PrivacyAn attempt has been made to make this tool reasonably secure. For its original purpose, the most "sensitive" piece of information kept is usually considered to be someone's birthday (people are always sensitive about their age). The main concern is that members feel comfortable sharing their contact information, knowing that it will only be available to other members, and will not be gathered by spammers, as it might from a tool with no security measures. Some provisions have been made to allow former members to flag their infomation to be accessible to current members. More importantly (IMO) is the issue of authentication, ie. knowing that only Joe Q. Member (and the admins) can change Joe's information. Cookies are used, and every "submit" causes a re-verification of a member's ID before the action of the submit is taken. This function is included in the config file, and may be customized to each particular club depending on their level of concern. Current statusThe script itself has been in use since Jan 2003. But only recently has it been adapted for more general use, with the "extras" being added (such as scripts to populate a new database), as well as generalizing the code to make it easier for others to use without massive search/replace of strings, etc. See the CHANGELOG for more detail.
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Roster Tool, Copyright 2004 Mike Zimmerman
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