[Rubyforchange-talk] TROSA

[Chad Fowler]

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/"