[Tech] Supporter database status

[Jamie O'Keefe]

I asked the db-workers list about what other state party's are using
for dbs.  A bunch of them are using CiviCRM (www.civicrm.org), which
seems to be an open source CRM system.  It has a number of nice
features (tracking contributions, for example) and seems to have a
mailer feature as well.

However, it does not seem to have anything for tracking voters, though
I haven't used it extensively and we would need to modify our data to
fit in it, though that shouldn't be a problem.  There is this doc for
dealing with a very large data set:

http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/Large+Canadian+Political+Database+implementation

It looks like it can run on either Drupal or Joomla/Mambo and it is
PHP based.  The requirements are:

    * PHP 4.3.3+
    * MySQL 4.0 or 4.1
    * Drupal 4.6.3+ or Joomla 1.0.3+/Mambo4.5.3+
    * Joomla/Mambo version of CiviCRM only supports PHP4 at this time

While CiviCRM version 1.2 is NOT compatible with MySQL 5.0. A newer
version might have fixed this.

Here is a document on database planning:

http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/Database+Planning

There is a demo at their site that we can try out.

A possible solution might be to use this tool as a way to meet the
needs for tracking supporters/volunteers and contributors.  Then we
could build a separate voter database using another tool.

Speaking of tools, Django looks like it is more stable than Grails,
but its authentication model is better thought out than Ruby on Rails.
 However, I would be concerned about having three different
authentication methods (Plone/Zope, CiviCRM and the voter db).

On an other note, facebook (another social networking site similar to
myspace), has an api we could link with our supporter database.  i
haven't seen anything for myspace.

Jamie