karl@??? - 05.12.25, 08:12:32 CET:
> Steve Litt:
> > karl@??? said on Thu, 4 Dec 2025 00:37:16 +0100 (CET)
> >
> > >Do anyone of you know about any free and open source software I
> > >could put on my site to handle management of a choir ?
> >
> > What is involved with management of a choir? Is it any different from
> > managing any other business or nonprofit?
>
> 1, Make available:
> the semester plan, which days to rehearse, when to perform, etc
> sheet music in pdf form
[…]
> 2, Something that let people tell that they don't come due to
> sickness
> jobs
[…]
> 3, Something that lets people send messages to each others.
>
> 4, perhaps some inventory help
> which person have lent what things
> which sheet music does the choir have available
>
> Anything else "ordinary" people would want (don't know what that would
> be).
>
> ///
>
> In a not so flashy situation:
> 1, could just be a directory available throught a web server
> Most people seem to use smart phones a lot, and the directory listing
> could turn out to be small on screen, I have to tell people to enlarge.
>
> 3, could just be email
> Problems with mail server are:
> . that gmail seems to place things in the spam (?) bucket, and the not
> to computer experienced people cannot convince gmail to stop that, so
> they simply doesn't see the messages
[…]

I believe you could model quite some of that with Nextcloud Hub and some
of their apps¹ like Nextcloud Forms, Nextcloud Tables, Nextcloud Calender,
Nextcloud Contacts, . They do have some automation framework in there that
could be used to model processes like you outlined. I pretty much bet it
would not be an out of the box solution, but if you glue together some
form with an automation script – which AFAIK would be some clickable stuff
– to stuff data into some table…

Part of that functionality would also be included in some appointment
planning software like: https://framadate.org/abc/de/

Regarding the question whether web based or not: I also prefer fat
clients. However the software in question needs to have a network part as
I do not believe all the choir members are living in one place. So
regarding the amount of effort needed to set up a solution it may be
easier to go web only with that. If you have time left, you can still
implement a client software for Linux and/or Android or IPhone.

With Nextcloud for parts of functionality fat clients are available, like
sharing files, doing video calls and so on.

However deploying Nextcloud can be quite easy or quite complex, depending
on how you like it. I did it the "hard" way by installing everything
myself. Meanwhile I use an Alpine Linux container on top of Devuan, cause
they have packages for parts of Nextcloud². Video calls can be challenging
to get right, but maybe you do not need those. I have them without high
performance backend, but plan to implement that one as well especially
after I learned there are Debian packages for that (but not for the other
parts of Nextcloud). The easy way would be Nextcloud All In One
containerized approach. May be that the containers they have use Systemd
tough. So if you want to avoid that… I skipped on this approach, cause I
want to understand what I am doing. But it takes more time to set things
up the manual way. I am happy with the Alpine Linux container approach I
went for.

Once you have a working Nextcloud you could use an incremental approach.
Start with some part of functionality and then extend.

Other than that I believe there is some free software platform for NGOs
and similar organizations, but I do not remember its name currently. It
might be way over the top for your use case. Even Nextcloud can be a bit
much, but I limited it by only using the apps I want. Also there is a
software for congress planning that KDE and other free software developers
use for their planning of timetables. It even has a nice application
packaged in Debian called "kongress". You see an overview with upcoming or
recent congress and can see what is offered. I do not know about the
server part of this, but it should be possible to find out.

Mail server is complex. Very complex to get right. Especially with to big
to fail (really?) providers like Gmail and Microsoft 365. They refuse to
accept legitimate mails just cause you did not implement the latest
incarnation of DKIM, DMARC, SPF and then some. However they send out all
kinds of crap and do not care a single bit. I have Rspamd blocking rules
for crap that abusers of Gmail, Microsoft 365 and so on send out.

You could go for some cloud based approach. For example you can also rent
a Nextcloud with quite some providers. I suggest to use a not to big
provider and check carefully on their attitude to privacy. However even if
you install Nextcloud somewhere, unless it is on a server in your home
with stable broadband connection, you still need to trust someone.

[1] https://apps.nextcloud.com/

[2] I used a variation of this approach. One change I did was to stuff a
Nginx based reverse proxy in front of it.

https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Nextcloud

Best,
--
Martin