Hi all. I’m very new to this, so please forgive if I’m asking something that is very obvious!

We use Basecamp for several different research projects here. One of the projects wants to set up a form/survey that graduate students (GRAs) at other locations would fill out and then submit. Ideally my boss would like us to host the primary template through Basecamp. Our GRAs who are located throughout the state would complete one each time they do interviews with civilians. The concept is that then the project coordinator would get a form for each person interviewed. Because of security issues (regarding human subjects’ private information) we don’t want to use Survey Monkey. We also don’t want to have it feed into a database because the form itself was developed in Teleforms and it would need to be cleaned up and scanned in.

I know that we can load the document as a file in Basecamp and then the GRAs would download it, fill it out for a person, save it with a different name and then re-upload that file – that’s a little more time consuming than what we want. Plus some of them are on very slow dial up and/or are very technology-challenged in some cases. We want to make this as simple to use as we can.

Is this viable in Basecamp??

Thanks so much.

just a quick thought….

I am new to BC also, so I really am just forming an overview. My work has centered around getting an automated response back to a Message “form”. This is now working like a charm – I’m watching in other windows the minutes / has run 57plus hours now since I last started it. (It was glitching out at first after 12 or so hours but have solved that by restarting the thread if it was getting hung up on handshaking with gMail.)

I’m using messages and ran into the problem that we could not drag & drop only because we needed a bit more info – so we are requiring folks to drag and drop into a very basic “form” to associate things with a field name . So to say. Works very cute with FireFox. (I think it will work in basic FireFox but I’ve added a few d&d plug-ins and don’t know what is doing what anymore – it just works.)

This isn’t our “final solution” for end clients but is keeping me out of the web development cycle until things are framed out and that’s worth a lot to me right now! And give me time to hang out in forums… ;). Seems like it has a lot of uses here. But then it could be the old hammer and nail thing because I see this as a possible general solution to many things. Ruby has worked out very slick for us, the sender and receiver modules are probably less than 300 lines and half of those are comments. Gotta love that!

I’m seriously designing /implementing just now to allow other messages to become part of the “middle” program – the one that actually “services” the messages. This program is only concerned with appearance of different files in a “trigger” subdir as I have set things up. It is
the program that reads something and produces something. And the cool thing is that it can be expanded to do new tricks by way of other messages which are just script files. I’m using the DSL approach that Ruby makes so unbelievably simple and elegant. Excited like a kid about the power of this for our “knowledge base” application.

I’m testing it all out as I write this – its that new – for better or for worse. I spent days looking at website ads saying I could create websites “in minutes”. Right. I’ve had enough of that. Seems like many “custom” things can be done with these messages and this can be taken much farther. Not to reinvent a web page within a web page but to enable some general class of customizations such as “form filling”.

I have no thoughts on security, and no experience.

The cute thing is that responses happens quickly enough back to the message that someone can be informed that his message was accepted or that there is a problem with this or that. The form can be direct 100% ruby to “exec()” in your program which will make it easy for your programmer but make the form seem, perhaps, a bit odd. I am starting to think that perhaps someday BC could put “Yes/No/Date/Name” Icons or buttons on side of a new type of message for common responses to take this abit further but I have no clue if they want to get into this stuff.

cheers,

_george

Sunshine, I’m no expert on forms, but I think you’ll find you can paste all the HTML needed for a form into either a BC Message or a Writeboard.

I assume that your dial-up users don’t have a problem with being logged into BC for long periods. If they do, wouldn’t it be better to prepare a PDF or Word version of the form that they can fill in offline and mail back, or post on BC?