User:MarkTraceur/Proposals/VolunteerTracker

Abstract: An extension that helps track volunteers in a more helpful manner than "put them in a table".

Rationale
Why not just use a wikitable, or a list, or categories, or, or, or? Well, there are a lot of potential relationships between volunteers that we need to be able to track, as well as a lot of automatic-able actions we should be able to take, and the table solution would be hackish at best. Better to use an extension and enable those actions in a really well-integrated way, rather than try to hack them in with javascript or Lua.

Requirements
Roughly, what I'd want would be
 * An interface that lists all volunteers tracked on a wiki
 * Being able to subdivide them into lists based on tags that are added to them (by admins? by themselves? by others?)
 * Tags could include project names, skillsets, etc.
 * Being able to sort them alphabetically, by seniority in the project(s), by amount of responsibility in the project(s)
 * Adding actions like
 * "Add a section on their talk page" (integrate with Flow?)
 * "Email them" (maybe use hidden database so logged-in and registered volunteers can communicate with each other, but random anons can't see emails)
 * "Thank them" (yeah, it's cheesy, but I foresee it being useful)
 * "Contact them in IRC" (open a webchat, useful for those who don't have a persistent client)
 * Tracking multiple identities would be good - real name, email (hidden, see above), IRC nick(s), username(s) onwiki
 * Having groups of volunteers able to organize themselves somehow, even for really temporary projects (like working on a single patch) would be good