Orgmode as a helper for organizing an institute

Orgmode as a helper for organizing an institute

[Sven Bretfeld]

Hi Org users

As Orgmode is such a fantastic tool, I'm sure that there are some of you
who have experience in using Orgmode to organize more than your
individual lives. As far as I'm aware of the powers of Orgmode, it
mainly aims at individuals, less to groups of people or to the
"management-type of person" who needs to have the business of a whole
organization in mind. I may be wrong here, since I'm just an ordinary
user who probably knows about 10% of the Orgmode possibilities.

I'm not talking about a Groupware solution based on Orgmode, since I
don't think that it would be viable to push lots of staff-members into
learning Emacs and Orgmode. But maybe we can discuss even that.

I'm running a university department with about 20 staff-members,
assistants, student-assistants and so on. As I'm living in Emacs and
Orgmode, I wish to have the organization structure of the whole thing in
view with Orgmode. I have only few ideas how to achieve that. Maybe
there are some of you who already have a working solution.

What is needed is for example:

- A special Agenda-view to view presence/absence/holidays of
  staff-members. 

- Delegations (including deadlines).

- Responsibilities (organigram structure) [could be done with
  org-mindmap].

- Special dates relevant to the (or some) institute-members (but not
  necessarily relevant to the user himself, since these would show up in
  the personal agenda anyway). For example, I would like to see an
  overview of all courses given by our teaching staff in a weekly agenda
  view.

I think dozens of items can be added here. Each item individually will
be no problem for Orgmode, that's clear. 

The main problem is, that organizing a personal life and organizing a
group (institute, family etc.) follow different logics. They will have
different sets of tags, todo-keywords, agenda-views and so on. These
different logical structures need to be separated, but be accessible by
parallel setups, maybe through some kind of switch. I don't think a
different set of org-files would be sufficient. For example
aganda-views, Groupware software like eGroupware has switches to view
either a personal calendar (your own or of other members) or a common
calender showing all dates of all associated persons simultaneously.
That's the direction I'm thinking of.

I'm looking forward to a discussion on this topic or maybe hints to
already extant solutions I don't know about.

Greetings,

Sven