General Information for organizers
Motivations
A friend who is in charge of managing an organization called me one day and
asked me for help. He needed a home page for his organization and
he needed to write some custom CGI programs to manage his members.
He said he actually already had a home page for his organization. But there
are too many restrictions imposed by his web host that he could barely do anything
except putting some static pages and FTP some announcements and pictures.
Another friend who is a volunteer in technical matters of a church also
called me for help: "Can you give me a free web page for my church so that we can...
we actually already have a home page for our church at Geocities, but..."
The common problems we see here are that:
- there are many "free home page" for individuals; e.g., Geocities.com.
but it is very hard to find "free home page" specially targeted for organizations.
- there are many public directory services; e.g., ClassMates.com;
but none of them allow the specific organization to manage their member's data
directly.
What we need is a "free home page" for organizations and with the
capabilities of directory services that can be directly managed by the organizer of
an organization.
Introducing Gathery...
"Gathery" is a free home page service targeted at organizations with features
designed specifically for helping organizers to manage their members
easily and effectively.
There are two most fundamental services provided by Gathery:
- a free home page for organizations and organizers can easily upload and maintain
his web pages.
- a built-in directory service (member database) that the organizers of an
organization can manage directly.
In addition to the two fundamental services, there are also numerous other features
that can help organizers effectively manage their organizations.
Also from ordinary members (as oppose to organizers) point of view, there are
many features that will help and encourage communications among members and
thus increasing the coherence of this organization.
The details of services offered to organizers are described in
"services to organizers of an organization".
Here we will just give a very simple example feature of Gathery that will show you why
you will need Gathery.
A typical organization will distribute a newsletter to all its members once a month
or once a quarter. Before using Gathery, the only way to effectively distribute
the newsletter is by snail mail, which is costly and time consuming.
With Gathery, you can distribute the newsletter by different means depending on
the choice of "push" method of each member:
- the member will come to the web himself to see the newsletter
- by e-mail
- by phone
- by fax
- by snail mail
In Gathery, the manager of an organization can make 5 different lists of members
and distribute the newsletter in 5 different ways!
General help/info for organizers
An "organizer" is the person(s) who created a Gathery organization (GO) for his
organization. Once a GO is created, three super-users (a "Manager", a "Webmaster",
and a "Treasurer") will be created
automatically for this GO. The functions of the 3 super-users are
described below:
General help/info to an ordinary member of an organization
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