I work in the non-profit 'industry', in the Information and Referral field. What most I&Rs, as they call themselves, do is to answer telephone calls from people in need of health and social services and make referrals using a database frontend. Increasingly, they want to offer their data over the web, share it amongst themselves and have redundant copies available in the case of emergencies and disasters. At this point phone switching and VOIP is not a large concern, but the I&R system would ideally interface with the telecom system at some level.

These organizations scale from a one-person, part-time shop answering specialized questions, to a 200-person, 24-hour call center fielding all sorts of calls from disparate geographic areas. My problem is that all of the software I'm aware of is proprietary/closed-source and it all SUCKS. For example, there has been an XML industry standard for 4-5 years at this point, and as far as I know none of the commercial packages supports it properly yet. I could go on.

What the database needs to do is store details about service providers, about calls and about callers. This logically breaks into two separate frontends: one for entering service/provider data; and one for entering caller information, searching for services and saving call details.

I think that these software needs would be better addressed by the open source community, but as of now I am only aware of one project, which has been abandoned (and was using PHP, which seems like a bad choice to me). I would like to get something started in C++, Java or another language that lends itself to cross-platform development. However, I am barely proficient at bash, python, PHP and js scripting. I am not afraid to try to learn a more complex language, but I'm not sure where to start.

I'm attracted to qt for obvious reasons, not least of which is the new SDK which looks noob-friendly. I am turned off by Java, but it might just be because it gets bad-mouthed a lot. I am intrigued by the mono framework, but I don't understand how it works on Windows machines: can you just unpack some executables and DLLs, and be up and running?

Finally, should I try to build a proof of concept in Python first? I don't fantasize that I could actually build the whole project from start to finish, but I want to make something to fire the imaginations of more experienced developers and, hopefully, hand it off to a functional community.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for reading.

Why wouldn't you make this a web project? Is there a reason to tie it to the desktop? How much design have you already started? And to finish this round of questions: Do you want any help with this project?

Regards,

Alunduil

P.S. e-mail me if you'd like to start working on this. I'd be more than happy to help contribute to a nice project like this.