Gregor Purdy - Software - Morale

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This Perl module is used to manage morale files and tkmorale is a graphical interface to individual morale setting and group morale calculation. The underlying idea is that the members of a group of people can reflect their current individual morale levels and then anyone in the group can get a feeling of the overall group morale.

A history of the idea is available by running perldoc Morale. This also includes some aspects of the original implementation not yet present in this implementation, such as the ability to have your personal morale actually be (semi-) private.

Thanks to E. Denning “Denny” Dahl for the original idea and the historical writeup present in the documentation. I first heard of the idea while having dinner with Denny at the Deerfield, Illinois Macaroni Grille on 1999-04-28.

Future Directions

In addition to matching more closely the specification laid out in the historical note in the documentation of Morale.pm, the following are some additional ideas from my notes of 1999-04-30:

Scan the password database, grabbing users and groups. Check ~user/.morale, ~user/.plan (?) for morale info. Make sure it is between 0 and 100, if it is set. Allow messages, too? Also, /var/morale/users/user.
Make sure the file is owned by the user, and writable only by the user. If there is to be a master summarizer, and you want the have the users make their morale files only readable by themselves, too (for anonymity), then the summarizer would have to run as root.
The summarizer could be a deamon that runs periodically and writes various reports (/var/morale/reports/*): total, total by group, %responding, %illegal response, response age. Use groups to differentiate, e.g., staff vs. management morale.
/var/morale/config: users to skip (like root and app users like oracle), and groups, too. List of morale categories.
Morale in general, and/or morale by categories (projects)?
libmorale.a, so that other programs, not necessarily Perl-based, can access morale info? Then, build Morale.pm on top of it, and build non-Tk non-Perl interfaces, like a base X Windows, or GTK or QT version of the GUI. Some of these would be great projects for interested parties to contribute to the package.

And, finally, from my notes of 1999-06-11:

The Perl Cookbook, page 564 gives a technique for dealing with /etc/passwd vs. ypcat passwd switching for processing the password database for user information.

Releasees

Version 0.002 (2001-04-13)

Most of the work for this release occurred in 1999, but the final tidying for release and announcment occurred in 2001.

Version 0.001 (1999-05-02)

No Documentation
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: 2005-12-03 16:31:39 -0800 (Sat, 03 Dec 2005) $