About 5 years ago I volunteered to help our local SPCA (Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) build a computerized system for tracking hours that their volunteers spent. This an important part of the volunteer coordinator's job, as there are hours/year requirements for volunteers, awards given out annually, etc. Prior to that they were using a paper binder with sign-in sheets, and adding up everything by hand at the end of the month. With about 1000 active volunteers, this was no small task, and seemed like a place computerization would be an amazing help. I wrote up a simple system in Rails (which I had spent a fair amount of hobby time with) and it's been running there ever since.<p>Today, there are about 67,000 "hours" entries in the database, about about 3,000 volunteers (1/3 of them active), and the system is a little slower than it ought to be (my original testing was with tens of records, since there was no existing database to import). Rather than try to update and re-learn ruby and rails, I opted to give a try porting the essential parts of the system to Python using bottle.py<p>The result of my work is now up at https://github.com/vets/vets and licensed under MIT.<p>I'm at a point where things are about functionally complete and I'd love to hear feedback from anyone willing to take the time to take a look at it. It's a generic enough system that I could see other non-profit organizations (who often have much/any money available to spend on commercial software that can track things like this) being interesting in this.<p>Things I'm not that great at, which are incidentally the main things this project uses:<p>* Python
* bottle.py
* SQL
* HTML/CSS<p>This is a hobby project for me (I'm a C programmer by day) so I am probably taking a naive approach in most cases, but in some cases I know that when I re-deploy this version of the system, it's likely to sit for another 5+ years.
I have been putting together a list of software to look at for a tech-based activism/volunteerism site I'm working on. This looks like it could be very useful and I'm looking forward to checking it out this weekend. Thanks for this!