REPOSTED

From: David Geilhufe
Sent: Monday, October 17, 2005 8:05 AM
To: ctcmembers
Subject: Re: [ctcnet] Could Google Earth revolutionize CTC work?

Another factor for CTC's in leveraging GIS for their work is the
release of CiviCRM. CiviCRM is open source, nonprofit-centric
constituent relationship management (CRM) software.  Think of it as
an open source version of Kintera/Convio.

CiviCRM has a nice little google maps integration that could allow a
CTC to easily collect and store their own data and "automagically"
have that data displayed in Google Maps. Imagine walking your
neighborhood and creating a list of blighted properties. A map can be
generated and displayed online. On your website, volunteers help to
identify the owners of those blighted properties and store that
information in the database. Other volunteers can call those property
owners and work with them to improve the property.

All of this happens when specific people work toward "prooving the
concept" with the various software tools avaliable to them. The next
step is taking the proof of concept and actually making it
standardized and easy to use. And finally you get the software
adopted widely, creating enough of a user base to ensure the software
doesn't disappear into a void of no support, no consultants, and no
sustainability.

CiviCRM has been integrated with the current CivicSpace release
(www.civicspacelabs.org), offering a simple automated installer. You
can try a demo of civicrm and look in depth at the code,
documentation, and community at www.openngo.org.