Use cases for a FOSS project

[mcsmom]

I explained one thing that we are using civi for to Dave, and he thought it would be a use case for cases.

So our non profit owns some trademarks and we also own some copyrights. People in our community like to use our marks and we like to let them, but our lawyers tell us to maintain our marks we need to monitor and control use. The same applies to our copyrights.

We also like our users to form user groups and to organize conferences.

And of course we like them to build extensions and list those extensions in our directory.

A lot of times these people are the same people and a lot of times they have multiples of the same type. For example, they may control multiple domain names that include our name, they may have multiple uses of our logo, they may have organized several events over the years, and they may run a user group.

So, thus far we have been managing these with tons of custom data. Also, for example we have a data model that makes every domain name an organization that is owned by someone, so that the same person can have multiple domains without messing up the records.

Someone wants to start a user group, she submits a form with the information to create the organizational record and these days we give her edit privileges on that record.
On our side, we review the application and usually ask some questions. Then eventually we approve the group.

At the same time this person wants to publish a book with a copy of our logo on the cover. Now, she fills in our logo use request form agreeing to some basic conditions for use. Again, we review the information, usually ask a few questions, and then approve the logo use.

Six months later volume two is done, so she again asks us for a logo use and we repeat the process.

Later she wants a domain for publicizing the books and her business so she fills out a domain name use form. Same thing.


So my case types are:
Start a users group
logo request
name use request
domain name request
event organization