gdylee88
commented
2 years ago We at Ravens Crossing will be doing car sharing at some point, but more importantly we would like to use Gather to manage our common washing machines and dryers. Similar to car sharing, we want to be able to book the use of a machine, and automatically get charged for its use. Currently only meals have that function, but for rental of a resource like a washing machine or dryer, it would have to be time or number of loads based. Car sharing might have other considerations like miles driven.
Also once you are many more resources to manage, we need a way to break the 1:1 relationship between resources that are booked, calendars, and events. I book a washing machine for use at a time (there might be a few machines, so I am booking machine 2 for 2-3pm, and let's say it costs $1. You would not want one calendar per machine, so you need a way to group a bunch of resources on a single calendar.
smoyte
Email from Gary H at Bozeman: There is a group of Cohousers that have started a monthly meeting of people interested in operating a car-sharing operation within their cohousing communities. During a recent discussion, I mentioned that Bozeman Cohousing has plans to use Gather as a means of making reservations for our shared cars. I was asked to do a quick demo of this capability, and have agreed to do so (this Saturday, April 16th, at 5 PM EDT).
To do this, I have created a Calendar for each of our 3 shared cars, and we record Reservations for them as Events on the appropriate calendar. On Saturday, I just intend to demonstrate creating a new Reservation for one of our cars, and showing how the Calendar displays all the Reservations for all 3 shared cars on a single display. I also intend to show that someone can't set up a Reservation that overlaps in time with an existing Reservation.
So far, this functionality is very similar to Google Calendars. The shared cars are treated as "resources" that a member can use when creating an Event, just like, for example, a Common House meeting room might be a resource someone could reserve for an event.
We are interested in whether these Events can be assigned a cost, in some manner? For example, what if we want to rent out a meeting room to someone, at a given rate ($20/hour, for instance)? Similarly, we will want to charge a shared-car user based on time used, or distance driven. If we have charges associated with use of a resource, we'd want to be able to integrate it with billing capabilities already within Gather, so that a member's account could include car share charges with meal charges.
Along with this, we'd need some kind of capability to confirm actual usage, after an event - did the reserver actually use the meeting room? Did they actually use the shared car for the times given in the reservation? Can we collect input on associated parameters (e.g., miles driven)?
I'd like to know what ideas you have on adding this functionality? We can certainly use another means to track this usage, and track amounts owed, but it would be very convenient to have it integrated with the scheduling capability. Our car sharing group has more than 30 participants currently, so this sounds like functionality other Cohousing communities would like to see supported in Gather, at some point in the future.