I visited two complex systems in Unity today. The first was a visit with BobV at the Food Pantry. We have the best food pantry operation in the state and Bob is the reason why. He explained the various sources for food donations and purchases, how they cooperate with other food banks, how they work to lose food pantry customers by offering cooking and gardening classes, even classes on raising chickens. So smart. I was impressed with his system for curbing problems like double dipping and theft, and how a set of dedicated volunteers and a web of connections to churches, businesses, non-profits, and government agencies provides an efficient social safety net to local people in need. A well-oiled machine.

My second system glimpse of the day was a meeting at MOFGA with the fair director and the tee shirt operation (Vicky and Melissa). The fair is a huge operation with dozens of area coordinators, hundreds of volunteers and a whole lot of tee shirts. They use some free survey type software to register volunteers; they use a spreadsheet-database hybrid thing called Panorama to manage the tee shirt orders. I don't know what they use for scheduling. They don't have anything like a real database. I actually admire their lack of dependence on software and IT systems and I don't want to introduce much dependence. Still, I think I will be volunteering to create a proof of concept for a simple relational database with a web front end for them. The design of the database is always the most important thing. If that is done right, the methods of accessing it can change over time.