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Discuss possible platform collaboration?

m.stenta's picture
Submitted by m.stenta on Fri, 02/21/2014 - 3:17pm
Topic Type: 
Question

Hi Bill! My name is Mike.

I'm working on an open source web-based system for recordkeeping and bookkeeping geared towards farmers. It's still in the early stages, but I'm excited about it and I think it has a lot of potential.

The basic idea is that it will be a web-based interface for doing the same things that your spreadsheets are doing. So instead of having a flat set of sheets for different purposes, it can have a more flexible hierarchy and user interface, including a section dedicated to auto-generated reports. Underneath all the covers, though, it is essentially the same thing... except instead of storing data in spreadsheets it's storing it in database tables (same idea, rows and columns, and relationships between different sheets/tables).

I was curious if you'd like to have a brainstorm session sometime, and discuss possible collaborations. Your spreadsheets are an excellent start for data collection and reporting! I would love to add a layer of web-based UI on top! I think it could be really cool.

(I think the personal contact forms on this site aren't working at the moment - I just notified R.J. and he's looking into it - so in the meantime send me a message from http://farmier.com and I'll get back to you via email!)

R.J. Steinert's picture
Submitted by R.J. Steinert on Tue, 02/25/2014 - 3:03pm

It sounds like Mike is the right guy to help push this forward, the interests align very well :-)

Bill's picture
Submitted by Bill on Tue, 02/25/2014 - 8:28pm

Mike!

That sounds excellent. I've known for a while that this thing really should be a database, but I like the accessibility of Google Drive and I don't know how to achieve the same thing in a database without having to worry about having it hosted on somebody's server somewhere. I also want to keep it free. It sounds like you have some ideas about how to make it work, though.

I'm definitely on board with creating a better user interface; I've been toying with the idea of creating a linked Google Form, but that sounds a bit clunky to me. I have a friend who is a mobile app developer, and I've been meaning to try to get him involved, too. This thing really won't be anything until there's a mobile app for doing data entry from the fields.

Brainstorming sounds great. When's good for you?

Bill