Untitled Document

Fellowship IT Architecture and Overview
April 2007

How to proceed with this document:

The emerging IT committee should be able to review this overview, understand most of it, and ask questions to clarify what is not understood. This group should discuss their views of this material and then organize an approach to assuring a viable IT program for The Fellowship, beginning with the development of a strategic plan for website/IT services -- see comments underlined in red in item II.1. below and review documents on referenced websites. Such a strategic plan should become the guiding document by which the IT committee monitors, evaluates, and manages the ongoing development of Fellowship IT resources.

It would be nice to be well on our way to implementing a comprehensive plan by IC08. At this conference I would like to have a good exhibition related to our IT services, do a workshop titled something like, "Service Opportunities in Cyberspace", and have actual job descriptions available for volunteers to take on. This will also require having a good plan in place for coordinating the work of these volunteers.

A good goal for the IT committee would be to eventually provide assurance to the Executive Committee that developmental directions and decisions are being made in the best long-term interests of The Fellowship from administrative, legal, financial, and mission-integrity standpoints.

This IT committee should also be able to assure the Executive Committee that sufficient backup and restore procedures are in place to guarantee integrity of all organizational information, and that there are sufficient security mechanisms in place to protect sensitive data from unauthorized access.

If this all seems overwhelming it is because while your attention was diverted, a whole new world has come into existence. It will take some time and effort to catch up. But this emerging world is the one which we and the next generation of revelation workers will need to understand and exploit for effective propagation of the revelation as well as the fostering of emergent social infrastructure.

Three Primary Divisions of Fellowship IT Services

Area 1, Database Administration

Administrative procedures, business, and financial information.

Revelation-related texts and documents.

Area 2, Web Services Administration

Public and reader services.

Access to admin and revelation-based documents.

Area 3, Overlap and Integration

Web-based input to database system

Web-based access to database information

Web-based search capabilities

Web-based administrative procedures

Another way of looking at this: Database Administration manages the store of information. Web Services Administration manages access to this information and provides ability to edit, add, and delete information. Overlap is the area in which information is passing between data stored on servers and its users accessing it over the Internet.

Primary IT concerns that need to be addressed by the Executive Committee:

Planning and providing adequate staffing.

Assuring data integrity, backup and restore procedures.

Assuring integrity of system documentation manual.

Primary concerns of Area 1, Database Administration:

Maintaining data integrity

Managing storage media

Managing both ephemeral and permanent information (for example a conference registration record as contrasted with the text of The Urantia Book).

Primary concerns of Area 2, Web Services Administration:

Usability

Accessibility

Design, navigation, and services to meet organizational objectives

Primary concerns of area 3, Overlap and Integration:

File formats

Maintenance of code used for communication between database and display media.

I. Immediate Tasks, Area 1, Database Administration

Completion of Filemaker scripts

Drop list management

Automate adding new family members

Automate separating family member records

Complete implementation of online store features

Complete integration of store with Quickbooks

Complete integration of Quickbooks data with Filemaker data

Make decisions about architecture

Does Quickbooks data populate Filemaker tables, or does Filemaker information populate Quickbooks?

Create event registration interface

Create long-term data access plan; review and update existing database policy document.

Do we provide credit card processing and registration for events held by Societies or other related groups?

Which groups?

Do we allow Societies to use our database with online access to their member's records?

Can Societies edit their own records?

Create record update work-flow process which allows individuals to submit new information to someone in Fellowship administration for checking before allowing this information to update our database.

What about mailing labels? If Societies can view their data they can easily download this information and print their own labels.

Develop policy and procedures for assuring data integrity in context of multiple persons entering and editing data. (Or do we have only one person do this?)

Make sure that more than one person is familiar with data backup and restore procedures; create workflow for this and maintain with periodic checks.

Create data archiving policy and establish workflow procedures that can be implemented by the EC.

Examples:

Establish a clear policy about how and when approved minutes get sent to the webmaster for archiving.

Establish and implement procedures that assure web versions of all print media publications.

Establish and implement procedures that assure web versions of conference presentations (print, audio, and/or video).

Decide what information should be saved permanently, save for a specified period of time, or discarded.

Contribution records? How long?

Organizational service details? How much detail (be specific)?

Conference registration forms?

Should information deleted from the database be stored somewhere else for a specific period of time?

II. Immediate Tasks, Area 2, Web Services Administration

Administration

1. What is the purpose of the website? What do we want to accomplish with it? What actions do we want website visitors to take as a result of having visited our website? We cannot proceed without a strategic plan. Much of this present Fellowship IT Architecture and Overview document represents the strategic plan that has evolved out of necessity by default due to lack of Fellowship administrative involvement . The IT committee must become familiar with this plan if it is to provide criticism and guidance.

An excellent example of an institutional strategic plan is the University Libraries of Notre Dame Website Strategic Plan which is at:

http://www.library.nd.edu/daiad/website-plan/ Please take time to review this document. We should have a plan for The Fellowship which is developed along these lines to provide a means by which an IT committee could monitor, evaluate, and guide organizational IT evolution including sufficient advance planning for staff increases as the work grows.

Another good example is the Western Michigan University Strategic Plan for Information Technology which may be found at:

http://www.wmich.edu/itplan/strategicplan/index.html This document also warrants some study.