gistfile1.txt

This is a rough draft. Straight from the notes I took during the first meeting.

TNR stands for Trap Nueter Return

They processed over 400 cats in the month of January.
The scope of the problem would require over 1000 cats to processed every week. That number would require a 2 million dollar annual budget.

Roles inside of the organization:
Trapper
Coordinators
Phone Operator
Queue Manager

Queue managers and Coordinators will receive emails and phone calls requesting a TNR service in their area. These are usually people who are taking care of cat colonies under the county code 10.6. They can also receive contact from animal control and Heaven Can Wait.

This information is then given to phone operators to call back the given party and gather all of the necessary information (I will have the form later on). The information includes Name, Address, Phone Number, Number of Cats. This information is then sent to the Queue Manager.

Interesting note. This information is purely confidential. Feeding feral cat colonies is only legal in noncommercial Las Vegas county. Doing this anywhere else is illegal. The client has requested that only trappers that have been assigned to projects can actually see all of this information for that job.

Once the information is gathered it is entered into an excel spreadsheet. This is the trapping queue. Each ob is assigned an AR# (Assitance Request Number). The formation of the number is AR#0000. This is how they refer to jobs.

A job in the queue can have multiple states. Available, Claimed, Completed, Maintenance, Inactive. When a job is inserted it is important to mark down the number of cats the client assumed were in the area. When a job is marked as completed the actual number of cats needs to be marked down. This is used for reporting. Also during the maintenance phase, the number of cats needs to be tracked to see the growth in the area.

This part needs to be figured out in more detail. A trapper should be able to request/flag their interest in a job. The Queue Manager is the one who will ultimately decide who will receive the job. I’m not entirely sure about multiple flags. Also it seems the more than one trapper can be assigned to a job. Again, only when a trapper has received a job, are they allowed to view the client’s information.

Reporting is also important in this project. First and foremost we need a full data export. The second report that is needed is the number of cats per zipcode. The organization has to provide this to the county.

Other things that would be nice.

The organization has physical traps that they give out to the trappers. They would like to have some sort of tracking for this.

I asked about localization, but they said it would not be needed. Though it might be good for us to go through that anyway as a learning experience.

Mobile access. The owner uses his iPhone a lot and thought it would be a nice idea. Also trappers can update their status while out in the field. This can wait of course. I would rather wait to see what 37signals is about to release anyway.