Fellow ROSNF members:
In the last week we added over 20 new registered members. If we can keep this pace up we will easily achieve 1000 members by the end of August. One of the things I did this past week was contact my district fellowship committee chairman and tell him about ROSNF and what we do. I’m hoping to increase membership from my own district 6950 which has a Facebook page here:
http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/RotaryDistrict6950
I encourage everyone to contact their own district fellowship committee chairs and make them aware of ROSNF. And if you haven’t already, you can also help your district and club create Facebook pages to promote Rotary with club members and the public at large on Facebook.
This week I also posted a request for any members interested in helping to develop and maintain the first ROSNF Facebook application. I’m just getting started on the implementation of an existing Facebook Rotary hub built by Rotaractor Max Plischke back in 2008. The original application named open-club-directory has its open source PHP code and SQL database definition available to all here:
http://code.google.com/p/open-club-directory/source/browse/#svn%2Ftrunk
The target Facebook application under construction is here:
http://apps.facebook.com/rosnf_find/
I hope to get the code updated to current Facebook and MySQL standards and up and running on Facebook in the coming weeks if all goes well. If there are some on this thread interested in helping, let me know. I view this as a proto-type of the proposed RI Rotary hub serving those on Facebook. I’m hopeful that this application will allow Rotarians and Rotaractors on Facebook to try it out and provide feedback on what works, what doesn’t, etc.
This first ROSNF Facebook application will allow users to add their Rotary profile information and then they can use this application to search for other Rotarians and Rotaractors who have chosen to share their Rotary profile information. The search can be on any field in the Rotary profile such as name, district, club, classification, position, projects, etc. When matches are found, the Facebook profile pictures, names, and profile links are displayed.
Once this application is up and running with minimum of changes, then phase 2 hopefully will consist of replacing user entry of district and club name with real time access to RI One Rotary database service in real time to allow user to select zone, district, and club from pull down menus and avoid all the issues with entering name of club. Thanks to Peter Markos and his RI staff, I have the information on how to make this change but I just have not gotten to that stage yet.
Again I’m still looking for any Rotarians or Rotaractors interested in helping and becoming Facebook application experts in the process learning PHP, SQL, and Facebook API’s.
Don Higgins don@higgins.net
ROSNF Chair 2011-2012