I have used CiviCRM and recommend it for the situation you describe. Among other things, the CiviVolunteer module is being improved rapidly. CiviCRM can do things like track time for different kinds of jobs, etc. It also has a strong CiviEvent module that can track registrations, etc. If you are organized, and test it first, you can set up tablets at the check-in tables that feed directly into the CiviCRM setup. (Test that first and be sure you have reliable internet, etc.)

While CiviCRM is a cousin to Drupal, CiviCRM is increasingly being used by organizations who use Wordpress for their website, not Drupal. Pairing it with Drupal allows one to use Drupal Views to display the CiviCRM info in custom ways. Wordpress doesn't offer that flexibility. But if you seek basic but solid functionality now, and likely improved integration with Wordpress later, then CiviCRM with Wordpress can work fine.

I strongly recommend talking to a consultant to plan and to get it set up for you for the first time. Then your people can learn by doing. If they are capable of writing custom software, they can learn and use CiviCRM.

License: "GNU Affero General Public License 3 (GNU AGPL 3) and the CiviCRM Licensing Exception."

If this is legal, I don't know how. I've spent decades working in Washington, DC and heard of all kinds of scams. If he were just an advisory consultant, OK. But he's the CTO, who has enormous power in specifying technologies, affecting contract decisions, etc. Even if this is somehow legal, it's by the flimsiest of rationales and the lawyer who wrote it should be investigated.

Good point. The Acting Surgeon General sounds very qualified. I understand the position's powers are limited, and CDC takes the lead.

Do you have a source you can link to? Are you saying most of the "czars" appointed by Bush were eventually confirmed?

When you say "he works with the Senate", do you mean: As long as the appointee is eventually confirmed by the Senate?

Thank you for clarifying.

President George W. Bush appointed 36 positions in the executive branch to head offices coordinating interagency efforts. Republicans in Congress did not complain. According to one tally, Bush had 36 czar positions filled by 46 people during his eight years as president. When Obama continued doing the same thing, Republicans screamed bloody murder. Back on July 15, 2009, Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA) introduced H.R. 3226, the "Czar Accountability and Reform Act" which would have banned federal funds from paying the head of any office who was not confirmed by the Senate. It was cosponsored by 123 Republican colleagues, which is a major accomplishment. Their goal was to rein in the out-of-control White House.

Now, several Republican members of Congress demand that the President immediately designate an "Ebola Czar". The hypocrisy is extreme. On Oct 4, 2014, Rep. Kingston told the Washington Examiner: "Rep. Jack Kingston, R-Ga., said Saturday that while he "hate[s] to invoke the term 'czar,'" President Obama needs one to combat the spread of the deadly Ebola virus."

Meanwhile, Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) issued a statement (flash required) on Oct 3, 2014 that criticized the President:

"The AdministrationÃ(TM)s neglect at having a single individual in charge of coordinating AmericaÃ(TM)s Ebola response has caused difficulty with interagency coordination.... We need a designated leader, backed by the President, who can meet the urgency of this crisis head on and protect the American people, and end the confusion about who is charge of our total response effort."

To be clear, when Kingston, Burr (and Sen. John McCain, R-AZ, and others) urges fast action to put someone in charge, he can't mean confirming someone through the Senate, which takes months or even more than a year.

Final related note: The position of US Surgeon General has limited powers and would not be the supreme leader on Ebola. Still, it would not hurt to have someone in the job, and that person can play a key role communicating with the public. However, the US has no confirmed, permanent Surgeon General because the NRA is blocking the Senate confirmation of President Obama's nominee, Dr. Vivek Murthy. He is an MD and an MBA. He practices and teaches at Brigham and Women's Hospital and teaches at Harvard Medical School. He cofounded a clinical trials company, and an HIV education organization. But he supports an assault weapons ban and tweeted that he thinks guns are a health care issue. So the NRA's opposition means his nomination will never come to a vote. It is dead. Even if one disagrees with Dr. Murthy's position on guns, he has no power over guns whatsoever, and it's reasonable that a President get his people if they are more or less qualified and mainstream (not hacks or crazy radicals). Republicans are right to seek smaller government in some places. But to just throw the monkey wrench in the gears of government for political gain is not constructive. It's just politics.

DOD should move some data to the cloud if it makes sense. However, DOD's top priority should be to stop the rampant overclassification of data. This problem costs taxpayers enormous sums. It costs money to classify data and then store it as classified data. Later, if ever, it costs money to decide to declassify the data and do so. Meanwhile, too many people have access. Too often, information is classified to prevent political embarrassment of powerful players, prevent public debate on important questions, or just out of thoughtless habit.

Here's a great excerpt from a March 2014 piece by the coordinator at the non-government National Security Archive. The Archive collects declassified documents as a permanent archive. It is part of George Washington University. He writes:

In fact, it’s so easy to classify new secrets that government classifiers joke that they can find the authority to classify a ham sandwich. These secrets tend to be permanent. Just last month, the Department of Defense blacked out a fact students learn in US History 101 – that the Cuban Missile Crisis ended with a swap of Soviet nukes in Cuba for the US nukes in Turkey. There are so many new secrets created, and so few old secrets released, that the runaway US classification regime has become a menace to American democracy.

The most recent available data shows that in 2012 alone, there were more than 95 million decisions to classify US documents. The cost of storing these secrets for just one year well exceeds ten billion dollars. We can’t be certain of the exact figure, however, because the cost that intelligence agencies, including the CIA and NSA, pay to house their secrets is – surprise, surprise – classified.

The linked article has a great chart showing that the number of classification decisions quintipled starting around 2008, even though it was out of control years before that. DOD's classified data should be a small garden protected with a high wall.

I was a young House staffer in the 1980s when Panetta was Chairman of the House Budget Committee. I admired him as a person and a leader.

My impression is that he's become more and more part of the "deep state" in recent years. I've lost a lot of respect for him.

As Secretary of Defense, Panetta whined about defense spending cuts like a hysterical high school girl. He should have stepped up and confronted the Pentagon's bloat, corruption and mismanagement.

Finally, it is disloyal and unprofessional of Panetta to write a book this "honest" while Obama is still in office -- that would be true no matter which persons or parties were involved. Yes, Panetta will sell more books because he's criticizing a sitting president instead of a former one. Does Panetta need the extra money that bad? Or is he setting himself up to be invited to be a Vice Presidential nominee? (That's wild speculation.)

Finally, I agree that Obama doesn't fight his political foes enough. But Obama has been a tiny bit restrained on foreign wars, and that's wisdom, not weakness. I don't welcome Panetta's 30 years war. Among other things, the US cannot afford it financially. The US should restrain itself from so many foreign wars instead of borrowing trillions more that undermines our national economic security.

Good points. For those who care about the NASA budget, you need to understand federal budget politics. The NASA budget is part of "domestic discretionary spending". The Republicans have successfully pressured domestic discretionary spending for many years, and Democrats have failed in defense of it. Now defense discretionary spending consumes a larger share of total federal discretionary spending. If you support Republican budget policies, you support squeezing the NASA budget.

I could tell you many things to cut in domestic discretionary spending, but not enough to free up money to fund NASA. NASA has poorly managed its budget by starting too many projects it could never pay for. Then NASA whines about the result.

Agree. When I worked in Seoul, South Korea for six months, Internet was blazing fast, cheap and worked well in the subway.

I read the entire article -- a damn good story if you have time. Aside from the obvious political implications explicitly stated by Bamford, it's interesting to see what a risk he took to write and publish his first book: "The Puzzle Palace", despite intimidation from the government.

For those who think the two major political parties have been the same on the NSA, it's also interesting to note that the Carter Administration's DOJ declassified the key memo whereas the Reagan Administration's DOJ reclassified the memo and tried to put the toothpaste back in the tube. Note that the Democratic Obama Administration to the right of the Reagan Administration on this issue. Another reason I'm an independent.

Finally, there are the detective aspects: Bamford found that one of the NSA's early leaders soured on the agency and deliberately left his papers to the Virginia Military Institute (VMI), where Bamford recognized them as a gold mine. Bamford also used to just go sit in the entrance area at the NSA and listen to people chatting about work around him while they waited to be processed in!

...the launch services alone cost $187 million, which is more than twice MOM's total mission cost [of $74 million]

Aside from the main point (why the Indian project was cheaper), this article repeats an important error that we've also seen in discussions of US space projects for decades: failing to include the delivery cost to outer space in the headline cost number. It's misleading to give the cost of building the Space Station if it's just sitting on Earth. Oh, you want the Space Station in space?! Well, that will cost extra.

This matters because it massively underestimates the cost to US taxpayers of NASA projects. For example, NASA always refused to concede that launch costs were part of the Space Station program. To be clear, these were extra launches dedicated to launching pieces of the Space Station.

The failure to count launch costs as part of the headline tally also reduced for many years the attention to one of the most important barriers to the US space program -- reducing the cost of putting a kilo of anything into low earth orbit. That is changing, but it took too long.

Rather than micromanaging Secret Service tactics, Congress should remove one of the Secret Service's missions -- investigating financial crimes such as counterfeiting.

Protecting officials is important, especially in an era of bitter political discourse that has inspired many more threats against the President and others. The Secret Service should focus on protection as its only mission. The Secret Service mission of investigating certain financial crimes like counterfeiting should be transferred to other federal agencies which could do it as well as the Secret Service. Yes, it would mean letting go of part of the Secret Service's history, but that's what focus is, letting go of the nonessential.

As Boston.com reported in 2009, the nonpartisan, respected Congressional Research Service suggested considering this change:

The new demands are leading some officials, both inside and outside the agency, to raise the possibility of the service curtailing or dropping its role in fighting financial crime to focus more on protecting leaders and their families from assassination attempts and thwarting terrorist plots aimed at high-profile events.

“If there were an evaluation of the service’s two missions, it might be determined that it is ineffective . . . to conduct its protection mission and investigate financial crimes,’’ according to a inter nal report issued in August by the Congressional Research Service.

***
The Secret Service, long under the Treasury Department but now part of the Department of Homeland Security, was established in 1865 to thwart counterfeiting, a focus that has expanded to include a host of electronic and financial crimes.

Its mission soon expanded to investigating the Ku Klux Klan and conducting counterespionage operations during the Spanish-American War and World War I.

The job of protecting presidents started in 1894 with Grover Cleveland, who was guarded part time. That role expanded after the assassination of William McKinley in 1901, and it became a crime to threaten the president in 1917. Today, guarding the president and other top officials accounts for most of the Secret Service’s budget, which totals about $1.4 billion per year and continues to grow.

I have not read the report but won't defend the ObamaCare websites. The DC one is beyond awful. For the record, I favor a single-payer system so we wouldn't need all these websites to sign up.

As former congressional staff and longtime DC guy, I urge everyone to be skeptical of anything issued by House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Led by Chairman Issa, the Committee issues deliberately deceptive reports to grab a headline. They've doctored emails, etc. It used to be a good committee and probably will be again someday. For the record, I'm a political independent fed up with both parties.

First, as of 2010, DC was about 50% Black, 39% White, plus everybody else. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D.... As a (White) DC resident who moved back here a couple of years ago, one of the things I enjoy about the Metro is the casual, random, cheerful conversations I have with my fellow riders who happen to be Black. Second, I live in DC and ride Metro regularly. Occasionally there are annoying people (often Black), but very rarely threatening ones. Cell phone theft on the Metro is a danger here, like most places (and police don't seem to care anywhere). Third, Metro needs to better enforce its rules against food and drink (and smoking) in the system. In effect, Metro no longer enforces that rule so the cars can be a mess. I encountered a White guy smoking on a platform earlier this year and asked him to put it out. He blew me off, quite obnoxiously.

I think they could simplify Kmail without dumbing down the user interface, but I don't know if that's what is intended. By simplify, I mean clean up the function of the kwallet/akonadi/strigi/etc. mess to eliminate the constant nagging requests for passwords and notices that various email accounts are disconnected from the server. In March 2014, I installed OpenSuse and loved it -- until I tried to set up Kmail and its associated demons. I chose OpenSuse because of Kmail. I wanted Kmail's fine control and features, and found those manageable. It was the kwallet/akonadi/strigi/etc. complex that drove me back to Linux Mint. I couldn't even figure out how to disable the kwallet/akonadi/strigi/etc. complex, which would have defeated the goal of getting Kmail anyway. I spent many hours researching and found that users with more technical expertise than I were giving up on Kmail. The concept of the semantic desktop is great, and someday it might work. However, I saw complaints that Kmail has been a problem for years and is unlikely to change. I would be delighted if Kmail became usable by people like me.