Basic concepts

gia - Goals, Ideas, Activities - is based around a simple but powerful hierarchy model of fundamental agreements which have to be developed and carried out by your comunity.

To succeed with your cause, you must agree on Goals.

Goals

Goals are the different land marks which lead your way. You propably modify or drop a Goal along the way, or you add a new one. But you agree, that once all Goals are reached, your cause has succeded.

Ideas

To achieve the Goals, the group comes up with different Ideas. The more Ideas, the better; Maybe you brainstorm to come up with them. Anyway, you will want to organize, summarize and select the Ideas and focus on finding a minimal set of feasable Ideas that will achieve all of your Goals. During the walk, some Ideas will turn out to fail. Other Ideas will spring up, as the groups experience with itself and with its environment grows.

Activities

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. — Lao Tse.

In the end the journey also finishes with a single last step - and between them are .. steps. The steps your groups agrees upont to accomplish your Ideas and Goals are called Activities within gia. An Activity is a concretes step or action to be taken by one or more person. You will have your way to define, asign and manage the Activities of your quest. And you will want to be able to check them off, once done, in order to see your progress on the way.

The following diagramm depicts the gia model by example:

System Overview

gia is a Web application, it is hosted on a server (see deployment for hosting options) and individuals from your group access gia with a Web browser - either from their computer or from a mobile device.

gia has a database backend, where all Goals, Ideas and Activities are stored, along with the history of their whole *livecycle. A simple but efficient Web frontend gives access to the *items stored in the database.

In the default configuration, any net-citicen who has access to the server where gia is hosted can browse the goals. This allows you to present yourself and your project on the Internet, raise interest in your cause and invite for public discussion.

Two types of group membership are available: Admins and Users. Admins can register new users and make them Admins, they can create and modify each Goal, Idea or Activity. Users are allowed to view and comment on Goals and Ideas. So you can create an “inner circle” with complete control over the contents of your gia database and a network of supporters - the Users - with an inside view on Goals and Ideas.

Every change made to a Goal, Idea or Activity is sent by Email to all interested parties: these are unobtrusively auto-defined by gia: the creator of the item, the last user(s) modifying the item, the author of the change, and - at your will - any other user you put on the list manually.

Basic Usage

ToDo: explain, with screenshots, how to navigate the appliation.

Item Details

ToDo: Explain properties, comments, attachments and history. Expand on activities.

User management

ToDo: Explain registration and management of users.