CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

My suggestion here is (at this point) kind of theoretical rather than practical because it would be pretty difficult to implement it I think.

I spend a lot of time keeping track of relationships in our database. What I've found about relationships is that there are a substantial number that I keep track of that would make more sense if our database could track three-party relationships instead of only two-party relationships.

Example one:
John Doe => nominated => Jacob Smith
John Doe => nominated someone to => Financial Stewardship Committee
Jacob Smith => nominee to => Financial Stewardship Committee

Example two:
John Doe => member of => Nominating Committee
John Doe => representative of => Southern Meeting
Southern Meeting => represented on => Nominating Committee
--->relationship dependent on : John Doe => member of => Southern Meeting

We have a substantial number of people who are recorded in our database as being representatives to one group from another group, where the individual, and the two groups they serve as contact between, are all constituents in our database. It could potentially make our database make a lot more sense if these relationships were recorded as being relationships between three parties, so that if you remove John from membership in Committee A then you would also notice that he represented Committee A on Subcommittee B.