CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Have you considered the pros/cons of giving each parish its own install of CiviCRM + Drupal?   Then creating automation for updates/patches (such as using Drush/Aegir/etc) so they all stay at the same version?    Then you could use custom CRON jobs to share the data that needed to be shared.     

Wondering if enough data is different between each parish that sharing a single CiviCRM install would be a headache.  Also, in the case where all parishes share a single CiviCRM database, who would be the chief administer of the system for deciding global settings: such as custom fields, contribution types, event types, profiles, etc.

We would most likely be going down the multiorg approach since we have it running for several clients with various complex geographic and other layering.
You can then use a single Drupal site with lots of subdomains - eg Domain Access if sharing content/editing is useful.
Each domain then has civicrm forms - and if someone fills it in at x.yoursite.com then they get added to the container of contacts that the admins of x site should have access to - and ditto admins at site y get access to people who are added front or back end via the y site

hope that helps

if my brevity causes more head scratching than clarity - as it often does - happy to skype you through an example use case if that would help

Father Shawn - the concept of Chapter organisations came up @ the sprint & is slowly coalescing into a more public discussion. Both IMBA & Emphanos are in the stages of working through the documentation you have listed & improving it / coming up with their own.