So agree. Used to take my son there in the late 1980s, when everything was pretty similar to my childhood. Basically, wonderfully engineered things with handles and buttons. I went recently with my nephews and much of this is gone, gradually replaced by superficial, patronising displays.

Although, this is [without a doubt] young male troll-talk, I'm going to answer:

• - It's a lot simpler to find software that's as 'near' fit as possible, cuts down on custom code
• - You may have to maintain custom code, to keep up with changes in the core project, additional resource
• - This is a volunteer gig, so I'm anxious not to write thousands of lines of code for it
• - It's fun for everyone to exchange information about this, it's a very common problem
• - If it's a small set of mods, I'm going to try and get some of the local kids to do them
• - [in reply to the specific trolly-talk] Nope, I'm not asking for community custom mods

Good luck to you sir, but please grow up a little!

Yes, and used it for a while. Thanks for reminding me, may go back there. Last thing I used it for was a borough with tens of environmental projects that needed to intercommunicate, they migrated that to Ning, their loss, IMO.

For me, that's not a solution, I want something that doesn't depend/share-data-with a large for-profit. Actually I don't even have a facebook account.

Thanks! I'm the submitter, I'm 63 and have spent most of my life in IT. There's several 'near' fits to this problem, usually using CMS software, but it's still interesting to look for 'closer' fits and, in general, learn from others. 'Learn from others' is always fun, almost more than shouting at the kids on my lawn.

Thanks for all of these. I'm aware of Drupal and CiviCRM too. I've used Joomla for more recent projects because end-users find Drupal management 'harder', actually both are non-trivial. CiviCRM is really great but used to be pretty hard to install.

I'm not aware of openatrium and redhencrm, so thanks for those!

Thanks. I'm aware of and use Joomla too, but I'm looking for 'close fit'. I think one or two are appearing further down the thread.

Thank you. I'm 63, in the UK, have been alongside Accenture [Arthur Andersen as it was then] for about forty years during various projects. Every one has been a mess equally composed of their arrogance and incompetence.

I say this without bitterness, never worked for or been fired by them, for example. However a great deal of my tax money has been wasted by them, since, for reasons that no-one sane understands, they seem to be a darling of governments nearly everywhere, that does include the UK.

In the larger picture we badly need to fix the 'gap' between dot gov and sane IT, make a lot of stuff better, improve personal outcomes and save us a bunch of public cash. None of the big contractors seem to be very effective, but Accenture is surely one of the very worst.

Twin towers on Johnny Bravo: http://tinyurl.com/pvblodn, however I'm sure it's a cloud, something photoshopped/gimped or 'not meant to be that'. Intriguing to look at images that 'shouldn't' be too though.

That the research has ended? Maybe that's what they've made you believe using a late-model cerpan? Cue Twilight Zone music etc. etc. etc.

As a 63 year old, life spent in IT, I fear e-books: DRM, can't share, they will be very selective about texts [blockbusters, crowd pleasers], 'book' can be removed remotely etc. etc. That's apart from the pleasure of having a house full of book, trashy science fiction from the 60s and 70s, crime novels and even a few serious books too.

As a Brit, I feel that this would solve a great many problems simultaneously. No sneaky air-holes for these a*-holes either. There, I feel much better now...

Exactly, I have two phones, one for home, one for business, the 'newest' is three years old and I'm not changing either. They both 'work', apparently an alien concept to millenials other assorted young'uns.

It was an illustration. Actually, I don't mind if other people take me seriously or not.