Harvest management, grand.

[matthewhs]

We talked at a recent meeting about creating google forms for harvest sign-ups.
But we seem to have the beginnings of the necessary capability in the database.
The harvest coordinator would create a harvest with date, time, general area, fruit, and MAXIMUM number of harvesters. Harvesters would check in, add themselves as a harvester, which would decrease the maximum number of harvesters. I suppose we would need a facility for dropping out, which would bump the count. I don't know if we should allow a harvester to enter a count greater than one, for bringing extra people. We could show who is in on a harvest already. Possibly better, the act of specifying the maximum harvesters would create that many empty name/email/phone boxes on the harvest page, and interested harvesters could fill in names and contact info in the boxes. Or we just add them automatically, since from their login we know who they are. Wicked convenient would be if you could send a message automatically to the list of people who entered their addresses, to give them exact harvest address and any other info.

I'm concerned about the fact that a lot of people don't seem to be getting enabled for the full database view.

[rebeccanesson]

When Sam and I originally designed the database we had this same idea in mind. However, we ended up feeling like there was so much shuffling around and last minute logistics with harvests that a system where people self-manage on the website was not likely to work as well. (We had this spreadsheet last year where you could sign up for availability for certain days and it really didn't work at all.)

My take is that at the moment it is a plus to have a relatively small number of people actually managing the data entry in the database. I'd like to see all the site coordinators enter their own harvests this year. Once we get the process smooth I think we could expand in the way you envision to try to get everyone using the site as the main organization tool in addition to using it as a data recording tool.