Status of the Google Contacts Sub-Project

This page provides the status of the Google Contacts portion of the MT-WY Connect project.

Where We Are

Who knows?

We do know that this is a good idea. Having all of the contact info of MT-WY families on our phones would be great. We could then say, "Hey Google, take me to John Doe's place" and off we would go with a reassuring voice telling us that we just made a wrong turn. However, even though we have done a fair bit of research and thinking about this problem we have yet to find a nice, seamless solution. We are thus still in the thinking stages of the project. Here's where we've gone with our thoughts so far:

• We already have a Google account for this MT-WY Connect project. We could populate Google Contacts that comes with this account with all of the families contact information taken from the MT-WY Families shared spreadsheet. We could then siimply share these Google Contacts with all MT-WY workers. Grand idea group! Not really. Google does not have a sharing scheme in place for Google Contats. Not a good omission, Google. Actually, Google does have this feature in its for-pay version (called G-Suite) that it markets to companies and other institutions. It is prohibitively expensive for small fry. Google does allows non=-profit organizations to use G-Suite for free. However, we arent an non-profit organization; indeed we aren't an organization at all. Google requests all of the IRS documentation that proves that an entity is non-profit in before offering G-Suite for free. Alas./li>
• We could do what was suggested in bullet 1 with Google Contacts associated with the MT-WY Connect project. We could then give every MT-WY worker the login credentials for the MT-WY Google account, which would allow them to access that account's Google Contacts. In that fashion they could all synchronize their smartphonee contacts with MT-WY Connect Google Contacts. As changes were made to the MT-WY Families shared spreadsheet, those changes would propagate to the MT-WY Connect project Contacts which in turn would automatically synchronize with each worker's smart phone contacts. Actually, we have tried that on a small scale, and it worked. However, the Mt-WY Connect project Gmail would get warnings that some nefarious rascal was gaining access to the Mt-WY Connect Google Contacts. We could try this on a large scale to see if the warning messages disappeared after a time, but it is never really a good idea for either security or inadvertant mischief that could happen to the shared Google Contacts as a result in so many having ownership access to it.
• We can easily generate a tab-separated file from the various databases in the form needed for importing into Google Contacts. The work would then be up to individual workers to regularly delete all previously imported contacts and then re-import the contacts from an updated file.

Where We Are Headed

Who knows. Actually we do. As a first, fairly-easy-to-implement step, we will implement the suggestion in the last bullet point above. More on that forthcoming