Working on Jobs and Volunteers

I was out of town last week for work and thought I might have some free time to work on the plugin but other than my plane ride home, I had none.  So I didn’t make much progress but this morning I was able to finish up the admin side of the Swim Team Jobs and Volunteers.

Most swim teams rely heavily on volunteers so having a system where parents can sign up to work meets and practices is really important, at least I think so.  I know it is important to the MacDolphins.

Because all volunteer jobs aren’t equal, I decided to allow a value to be assigned to a job.  This way a report can be generated which reports the amount of volunteer contribution associated with each swimmer.  Some teams may elect not to use this and I will end up making it a configurable setting at some point but for now, it is on.

Now that I can define all of the jobs, I need to let people sign up for them – that is next on the to-do list.

Noodling on the Volunteer System

Over the last couple days I have been thinking about how to manage the volunteer system.  I suspect most teams are like the MacDolphins and the parents of the swimmers are required to complete some level of volunteering in the plethora of roles required to run a swim meet.  But how do you account for the dramatic difference in time each role requires?

I am leaning toward implementing a system where the roles are defined and then assigned some sort of unit value.  Each parent would be required to volunteer for some team specified units and the system would track how many units people worked.  For example, a timer might be 10 units and pizza selling might be 5 units.  If a parent volunteered as a timer at one meet and sold pizza at another meet, they have completed 15 units of volunteer time.  The units per role could be assigned such that the season long jobs (e.g. chair person) might be worth 50 units.

Just an idea, we’ll see where it goes.

Meet event loading is working!

This afternoon I was able to get event loading working for individual swim meets.  The system allows the definition of a standard set of events.  These events can be loaded into a swim meet to seed the swim meet and then tweaked for the needs of the specific meet (e.g. running the 6 & under groups early).

In the process I fixed a couple other broken things, the most important one being the controls on the GUI Data Lists widgets didn’t work on the ones which had a drop down menu.  Now that the events are loaded, I can start working on bringing the results of a swim meet back into the system

Before I do that, I will probably work on the volunteer system as that is something I need for our own swim team soon.