One of my newer clients came to me with some interesting needs, they are an all-volunteer organization with multiple project-groups and over 300 volunteers. They needed a solution for collaborative project planning (preferably web-based) and volunteer resource management. It turns out that managing people you pay is not that different from managing people you don’t.
I found the Open-Source project OrangeHRM (Human Resources Management) to cover all the requirements we could throw at it. One of the biggest challenges with volunteers, is matching tasks to those with the right experience. OrangeHRM allows us to track individuals’ skill-sets, and match a given task to the available volunteers. This greatly simplifies task delegation, and keeps you from overwhelming a volunteer with tasks outside of their skill set.
For Collaborative Project management, the Open-Source dotProject looks to fit the bill, offering web-based project management with a robust feature-set. While not as polished as some of the commercial SaaS packages, like BaseCamp, dotProject has all the functionality you need to facilitate team managed project planning.
I think between these two packages, I will be able to provide a solution that is both Open-Source, as well as best-in-class. If you are here looking for software to help organize your civic group, I would also recommend you check out CiviCRM, a really neat module that integrates with both of the major OSS CMS platforms, Drupal and Joomla. Most of us know CRM to mean “Customer Relationship Management,” CiviCRM touts itself as a “Constituent Relationship Management” package. While not offering the functionality I needed in this project, CiviCRM did have some interesting features, donation management not in the least. (Plus their logo is cool)
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OSS for your non-profit/civic group/church
One of my newer clients came to me with some interesting needs, they are an all-volunteer organization with multiple project-groups and over 300 volunteers. They needed a solution for collaborative project planning (preferably web-based) and volunteer resource management. It turns out that managing people you pay is not that different from managing people you don’t.
I found the Open-Source project OrangeHRM (Human Resources Management) to cover all the requirements we could throw at it. One of the biggest challenges with volunteers, is matching tasks to those with the right experience. OrangeHRM allows us to track individuals’ skill-sets, and match a given task to the available volunteers. This greatly simplifies task delegation, and keeps you from overwhelming a volunteer with tasks outside of their skill set.
For Collaborative Project management, the Open-Source dotProject looks to fit the bill, offering web-based project management with a robust feature-set. While not as polished as some of the commercial SaaS packages, like BaseCamp, dotProject has all the functionality you need to facilitate team managed project planning.
I think between these two packages, I will be able to provide a solution that is both Open-Source, as well as best-in-class. If you are here looking for software to help organize your civic group, I would also recommend you check out CiviCRM, a really neat module that integrates with both of the major OSS CMS platforms, Drupal and Joomla. Most of us know CRM to mean “Customer Relationship Management,” CiviCRM touts itself as a “Constituent Relationship Management” package. While not offering the functionality I needed in this project, CiviCRM did have some interesting features, donation management not in the least. (Plus their logo is cool)