[Rubyforchange-talk] TROSA

[Justin Gehtland]

Trying to reply to this (seeing if it makes it through, now):

That organization is still searching for the right people to build  
the app, and I think would relish having the help of this kind of group.

Justin

On Sep 13, 2007, at 4:29 PM, Chad Fowler wrote:

> Here's the email Justin Gehtland has been trying to send.  Getting
> stopped somehow:
>
> Recently, we were approached by an organization in North Carolina
> called TROSA [1].  They are a residential rehabilitation organization
> for substance abusers who have several businesses that the "clients"
> work in during their rehab in order to gain work experience and be
> part of a structured organization.  For example, we used them to move
> our furniture when we moved, and we buy our Christmas trees from them
> every year.
>
> The scenario is this:
>
> They have essentially "enterprise-level" needs.  They need an
> application to track their "clients", including things like medicine
> schedules, meetings with doctors and parole officers, tracking the
> admit process and the questionnaires they need to fill out, interface
> with government organizations, provide reports for the donors, etc.
> etc. etc.
>
> Their current infrastructure is based on 11 separate Access and/or
> Excel "applications" strung together will baling wire.
>
> Two years ago, they got a grant from (I think) the Kellogg Foundation
> to upgrade their infrastructure.  They found a company who said they
> would develop it in .NET Nuke. They spent two years and the entire
> grant and have no code to show for it, but they have very clear system
> requirements for what the application needs to do.
>
> It is very module, and could easily be tackled in small pieces, and
> those pieces have a high degree of possible reusability across
> charitable organizations.
>
> They have a small budget for this, since the whole grant was wasted.
> They also had unbelievably unrealistic timelines.  When we looked at
> the spec, we said it would be easily 9-18 months. Their original RFP
> (from two years ago) gave two months for dev.  Needless to say, they
> chose not to engage us to build the app.
>
> So, they are an ideal candidate because I don't think there is any way
> they are going to get something useful through normal commercial
> channels, due to the lack of funds compounded by lack of understanding
> of the nature of the beast.
>
>
> [1] http://www.trosainc.org/"
> _______________________________________________
> Rubyforchange-talk mailing list
> Rubyforchange-talk at rubyforge.org
> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/rubyforchange-talk
>

----------------------------------
Justin Gehtland
justin at thinkrelevance.com
www.thinkrelevance.com
919.824.5409



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://rubyforge.org/pipermail/rubyforchange-talk/attachments/20070913/79888264/attachment-0001.html