The IMCA has an increasing administration task, managing its members and boats. A web application and central database could have a lot of advantages as a tool for administering the IMCA. Such a tool could allow an online model of the IMCA for administrative interaction between members and the committees.
A Database of members, boats and events will allow a rich set of dynamic content to be generated when reporting about events and fleets. There is a lot of data out there (current and historical) but unless this is centralized it is hard to manage it.
This year the IMCA site was modified to use an XML database of riders, boats and events so that the content was easier to maintain. This data could be imported into a relational database and used further for page generation and administrative tasks.
Therefore on Rohan Veal's suggestion Doug Culnane proposes that an IMCA Database and web application be developed to model, report and assist in the administration of the IMCA.
The web application will support the following process. Note that these are aimed a modeling the IMCA processes that exist already.
Members can add data but only elected committee members (National or International) have the right to change or delete data.
Only Members can submit boat data.
A committee provides payment details and the committee members mark the payments as paid. There are online payment transactions.
Doug Culnane volunteers to program this application using Java technology. The source code will be placed in the public domain on SourceForge and released under the Apache 2 license. The Copyright ownership shall be granted to the IMCA.
This means that the source code can be downloaded, modified, maintained, developed etc.. buy any Java developers. Therefore it is easy for other Java developers, translators, testers etc.. to collaborate on the project.
Java technology is not as cheap to host as others so there are hosting costs involved. These are around £25 per month (eg. http://www.nameonthe.net/jspservlethosting.jsp)
It may be possible that due to the ease of membership an increased number of IMCA members my generate enough additional income for the IMCA to cover this cost.
A sponsor and or company that can supply an IP address and 2GB of bandwidth a month may be able to cover this. Doug will donate a computer but has been unable to find a network connection host.
The project will be split into stages. The first stage will be to implement the administration of members. Making it easy for new members to join the IMCA, and National fleet committees to administer their fleets. This will be complete before the end of 2007 for the 2008 memberships. After this is complete other processes will be built.
