Drupalcon Churches BOF (Updated)

For those of you who haven't looked at the BOF board at DrupalCon Portland - there's a BOF meeting Thursday afternoon.

Thanks to everyone for a great BOF. Here are a few quick notes on some topics covered:

1. Organic groups - this sounds like a tool that has been leveraged on many sites to create groups and access control around content
2. Auto-tithing / contributions - Civi-crm was a big player here, also I mentioned stripe as a great tool for easy PCI compliance.
3. CRM - Civi-crm, Redhen is also a Drupal-based crm tool to keep an eye on. It sounds like salesforce is used as well
4. Church member directories - again Organic groups was mentioned here as well. This branched into a discussion ab technology and ministry and whether churches should have a 'technology ministry.'
5. Volunteer scheduling - signup module mention, OG once again. http://www.onthecity.org/ was mentioned as one pretty expensive option. http://get.planningcenteronline.com/ was mentioned as a cheaper alternative. I want to create a new thread ab creating a planning center module as that seemed to draw interest.
6. Integration with Church systems - some have dealt with clunky desktop software like "Church Windows." Many are moving to strictly cloud-based member management. Churches should look at small non-profits for inspiration as they have similar challenges. http://www.nten.org/ is an org for non-profit technology and is a good resource (albeit left-leaning).
7. Content creation workflows - the workflow module was mentioned as a great tool for moderating content. You can have some users able to submit content while others have the ability to approve that same content. Workbench / total control workbench modules were also mentinoed.
8. OpenChurch - I gave a little talk on what OpenChurch can do and mentioned that I will be even simplifying OC more when I plan the 8x build (prob not until next year). See http://openchurchsite.com/ or the OpenChurch project page for more info.

Please add any other notes from the BOF you would like to include.

Also worth checking out for simplifying communication among groups in a church or to the entire church: tableproject.org

We just started using it in January, and people have been using it to ask for prayer share (physical) stuff with each other, and coordinate meals and other cooperative volunteer tasks.

I'm a fan.

-Joseph

With regards to Karen's keynote, what about working on the admin side of Drupal so it is simple to create new events/schedules with good semantic data and then using that as the source to render things like newsletters (maybe via print.css), HDTV display calendars, blocks on a webpage, and even an outgoing feed into the facebook api.

I would be worried about getting trapped into or too reliant on facebook. If you make it easy for users to put the content in, then you can shift it around wherever you need it to go if you have it in Drupal to start. If you start in facebook, you're at the whim of any changes they decide to make.

Good thoughts @andyguzman. So my idea does not necessarily tether Drupal to Facebook forever. Facebook would just be an easier front-end to get the content into Drupal. But if Facebook wasn't working or was cumbersome or whatever, I would just disable the feeds I was using and have content authors input the content directly into Drupal. The Facebook idea is just a way to make it easier to get fresh content onto Drupal. It would be used for news, events, media + whatever else we think is useful. For timely content I would like to make it as easy as possible to input.