InfoCentral
An open source research project..|
Features
People | Families | Groups | Finances | Properties | Exporting | Users | Miscellaneous
People are at the core of any church, and they are the most basic object in InfoCentral. The system allows you to track the following information for a person:
Individials are assigned to classification. Since each organization needs are different, each classification can be changed and ordered as needed within the organization. These classifications allow for individuals to be exported based on their classification.
People are assigned to families. InfoCentral tracks the following information for families:
People are assigned to families in roles. For instance, the person Bob Smith is assigned to the Smith family in the role of Head of Household. His daughter Courtney Smith would be assigned to the Smith family in the role of Child. InfoCentral allows you to view a families members and what roles they occupy. Within InfoCentral, the entire family roles system is customizable so that you can add, subtract, or change roles as the need arises within your organization. Personal infomation can override family information when viewing a person record. For instance, the Smith family record has an address, phone number, and email addresss, etc. When viewing Bob Smith's record, it inherits all the information from the Smith family record. Bob has no information of his own—his email address is families email address, etc. However, when Courtney goes to college, you can enter a unique address, phone number, and email for her, and her record will reflect this information instead of the Smith family record information.
Groups are the organizational and social elements of the church: Bible studies, Sunday School classes, greeters, support groups, ushers, childcare volunteers, etc. InfoCentral can track these different groups and the people that are assigned to them. Much like families, people are assigned to groups in roles. Bob Smith may be assigned to the Experiencing God Bible study group in the role of Study Leader. There may be 15 other people assigned to this group in the role of Student. InfoCentral can display a list of all group members and the role they occupy within the group. Groups have default roles. For a Bible study, the default role (the role that most of the members occupy) may be called "student". Any one assigned to this Bible study will be assigned in the role of student. In a typical Bible study, one or two other people could be assigned in the role of "Study Leader". Groups also have generic properties. Properties can be used to identify the group, such as "Youth" to notate that this particular group is made up of youth. Properties can help further clarify the purpose of that group. generic properties are those which can be applied to any group within the InfoCentral system. Groups can have Group-Specific Properties. These are properties that apply only to one specific group. These can further clarify the group by having each individual within that group have unique information, such as "Who is Bob's mentor" or "When did Bob join this group?"
Every organization requires finances to run, and churches are no different. Churches need a way to keep track of the giving of its members and InfoCentral provides a mean of doing this, through envelope number tracking, donation tracking, and fund tracking. Peole have to get their money to the church somehow, and the most common way is through tithing envelopes. InfoCentral allows you to assign envelope numbers to individuals and enter donations based on that envelope number. Never worry about duplicate numbers because InfoCentral has a built-in function to prevent numerical overlap. Once the individual has been assigned an envelope, a record needs to be made of their donation. InfoCentral allows you to keep track of the amount of the donation and date given. You can get a report on how much each individual has given, on which date, and the way the donation was given (check, cash, etc.). A receipt for each donation can be printed out for individuals and a yearly giving report can easily be generated. Also, reports can be generated concerning monies given. These reports allow data to be viewed about individuals, funds, and dates of donations.
Person, Family, and Group Properties Properties are a bit of an abstract concept, but they add en enourmous amount of flexibility to InfoCentral. Properties allow the user to invent his or her own labels to apply to people, families, or groups. The user can then apply these labels to those people, familes, and groups to which they apply, and assign them a value. For instance, say a user wants to be able to keep track of all disabled persons in their church in order to ensure their needs are meet at church functions. This user could create a new property called "Disabled" and assign it to all people in the church that have a disability. While assigning this property, the user can add a value, in this case the user would like to track the nature of the disability. At any time, the user can run a report on the database to display all the person records to which the property of "Disabled" has been applied. The same applies to familes and groups. For familes, properties could be things like "Grandparents Raising Grandchildren," Single Parent Household," "Alternate Address During Winter Months," etc. Some properties for groups could be "Bible Study Group," "Meets Off Site," "Temporary Committee," "Seasonal Group," etc. Using propeties, a user can essentially customize the InfoCentral database to store the information he or she needs. With proepties, the database can store almost any information necessary.
InfoCentral comes with a powerful records exporting system. The exporting system allows for records to be exported into a standard comma separated file (CSV) that can be used in most programs for creating lables, mail-merge letters, etc. Any record that is associated with an individual or family can be exported with this utility, including individual custom fields. This flexibility allows you to create a list of the mailing addresses of all members or to get a birthday list for all members of a particual Sunday School class. You only have to export the fields you need. The exporting system also allows for a wide range of filtering. Individuals can be filtered by: classification, family role, gender, group membership, and/or membership date. For example, all of the head of household (family role) males (gender) that are visitors (classification) can be exported. As such, only the records and fields you need will be exported. Also, records can be output as either individual records or combined families. When families are combined, the output for multi-member families displays simply the family name, e.g. "The Franklin Family". However, when there are single-member families, only the individual's name is returned. InfoCentral takes advantage of the vCard standard to allow for a powerful individual-exporting tool that can be utilized by a great deal of programs. For example, a vCard can be imported into Outlook to keep track of individual's email addresses or a vCard can be imported into Palm Desktop so that the information can be saved to a Palm-compatible device.
People in the InfoCentral database can be made users of the system. Users can be given granular permissions. A certain user, for instance, may be able to browse the database but not change any data. Other users can have permission to insert new records, edit existing records, or delete records. A user with Administrative permissions has rights to do all of these things, in addition to making other people users and monitoring their permissions. The permissions for users are:
As can be seen, the user system allows a great deal of flexibility when permissions are set for users. The church secretary, for example, can have full permission while the youth minister only needs to add, edit, and delete records. Users have password with which to log into InfoCentral. The system keeps track of the number of times a user has logged into the system, when they last logged in, and the number of failed login attempts (wrong passwords) since the last successful login.
Flexibility is the key to InfoCentral. A great deal of InfoCentral can be customized for the end-user. Custom fields are available for individuals and groups, creating a dynamic and flexible program that can cater to nearly any need that arises. Since InfoCentral is based on mySQL, a free-text query can be run to get the data with only a basic knowledge of mySQL. This allows the you to get exactly the data you want. Since InfoCentral is a part of the open-source community, people are welcome to make changes and modifications to the code (within the GPL). If one organization makes a change to the program that would be useful to others, it can be submitted and InfoCentral grows and improves. Open-source allows InfoCentral to easily be updated when bugs are found, to easily be modified for individual use, and to be an affordable databasing package for churches. |
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