Hi,

Is anyone home at ODB? This inquiry is basic and is 6 weeks old! If you believe that simple requests should be paid for, please announce the new policy publicly!

And thanks for the wonderful software,

Christian Sweningsen
NewScience Alliance
An active-networking resource community for qualitative, phenomena-based science education

Boy, was I grumpy when i wrote that! But -- I have spent literally dozens of hours with the manual, the customizing sheet, the script, the forums, and have been through all of the archives. And there are *many* really basic questions that I have not been able to resolve, around basic setup, having to do with the various categories.

But I'm afraid to post anything on the forums, they seem to disappear into the vapors. I am *very* anxious to get this set up! If I had any money left at all, I would be more than happy to hire set-up, but I've gone through my whole life savings. When this gets rolling, I will sure contribute to what I consider an especially fine inititiative -- fine, that is, except for documentation and response to the forums!

Christian Sweningsen
NewScience Alliance
An active-networking resource community for qualitative, phenomena-based science education

hi Christian --
My apologies that your question was missed. scroll down further for some answers...
Yes we do answer everything that is in the forums eventually, but we are primarily an open source project that is supported by paid support consulting. There is no guarantee that the developers or staff from OC will provide any free support...
Mainly because we are focusing our time on paid ODB customers, and since our rates are low for support we operate on pretty thin margins. If we spent a quarter of our time on free support the project would not stay afloat.

These forums do allow users of ODB to support each other. So we do need to find a way to encourage existing users to help novices more often. Perhaps someone has some suggestions on how to do this so I will post this to the ODB help list.

-rich

Christian --
In response to your first question, the user guide of ODB that is installed with the software is the definitive guide. The web site includes some FAQs that were written before 1.0 was developed and you have stumbled upon one of them. I will immediately delete the offending paragraph... about people-group relationships. I apologize that this was not updated. We did develop the feature that is described and a couple of nonprofits field tested it, but we decided not to release it because it would have required much additional development to make it polished and would have increased the amount of training needed for novices to use ODB.

Instead our development efforts are focusing now on ease of use, reliability, compatibility with different software environments, and internationalization to other languages.

If you truly have a small start up organization, you do need to consider how much your time is worth. If having a consultant set up the software in 5 hours, at a cost of $250 to $300, would have saved you "dozens of hours" -- say 36 hours... then how much fundraising would you be able to do in that 36 hours? Many people I know, whether in a noprofit founder capacity or not, are able to identify twenty possible donors (think about raising money for a charity bike ride, road race, walk for hunger, etc.) in less time than that. Your startup could just use a spreadsheet until you reached 100 donors and then you could pay for support -- and of course part of that support would include importing that spreadsheet into ODB.

I am sorry that you have had so may unanswered questions but I truly hope that we can work together to get the community to become more self-supporting for the software.

Rich Cowan
ODB Project Director

i think we should have resturants support our schools. I mean... why spend $2 on lunch that we dont even like. in some cases there are kids who dont even buy school lunches. i know mcdonalds isnt healthy but what about places like SUBWAY, CHICK-FIL-A, PAPA JOHNS, PIZZA HUT ETC. this way we can eat food we accually like and that is healthy for us! and it can still fit the board's healthy food plan!!220-702 \ 1Y0-A15 \ 70-515 \ 70-573 \ HP0-S27 \ 650-568 \ 70-643 \ EX0-101 \ 70-401 \ 156-215.70 \ 1Y0-A05 \ 70-652 \ 642-681 \ 640-460 \ 642-583 \ 650-195 \ HP0-D07 \ 70-663 \ 70-576 \ 70-450

i think we should have resturants support our schools. I mean... why spend $2 on lunch that we dont even like. in some cases there are kids who dont even buy school lunches. i know mcdonalds isnt healthy but what about places like SUBWAY, CHICK-FIL-A, PAPA JOHNS, PIZZA HUT ETC. this way we can eat food we accually like and that is healthy for us! and it can still fit the board's healthy food plan
642-185 | 642-731
642-741 | HP0-P14 | 646-364 | 352-001
642-165 | 70-643
70-511 | 650-177
70-450 | 70-685
F50-532 | 70-536
650-296 | 70-576
642-062

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