enlarge John Patriquin/Staff Photographer

Bowdoin College students Taylor Talmage, Oliver Radwan, and Max Palmer are working on software to help Ronald McDonald House in Portland schedule and manage its 300 volunteers.

enlarge Jack Milton/Staff Photographer

Peggy Rowe, a volunteer at Ronald McDonald House, trains by shadowing fellow volunteer Betsy Hillman in Portland recently. Students at Bowdoin College are working on a computer program to schedule the house’s 300 volunteers.

enlarge Jack Milton/Staff Photographer

Becky Neidetcher, a volunteer at the Ronald McDonald house since its opening in 1995, said the current handwritten system of organizing the volunteers’ schedule can be tedious and error-prone.

In the age of iPhones there is a multitude of gadgets capable of running people's daily lives and doing everything short of making dinner on the go.

But living in an era of increasingly sophisticated technology can have the effect of almost romanticizing the simple, straightforward analog solutions to problems, even if they aren't practical and fly in the face of reality.

For years now, volunteers at the Ronald McDonald House in Portland have relied on a rotating handwritten schedule to keep track of hours and responsibilities at the organization, which provides a place to stay for families while a child is undergoing treatment at nearby hospitals. It's a simple system, but also one that can be thrown into chaos with a smudge or unintended erase.

"It's all done in such an archaic way," said Gabrielle Little, house manager.

They wouldn't mind having some of that new technology.

A project under way between the Ronald McDonald House and Bowdoin College aims to establish new computer software to help the nonprofit and other charities and aid groups manage their organization.

A team of computer science students is working to create a software package that would act as a scheduler and database of volunteers. If the software is successful it would be available through the college's Web site.

The project is part of a growing push to use free and open-source software for the benefit of humanitarian groups. The scheduler would be open-source software, which means the program can be freely distributed and modified, as well as capable of operating on a number of platforms with other software.

"There's been some remarkably good open-source software. We hope we can add this one to the list," said Allen Tucker, a former Bowdoin professor who is overseeing the project.

Since January, Tucker has been working with four senior computer science students to build the software, which will coordinate and manage the schedules for the Ronald McDonald House's 300 volunteers.

The house typically has two or three volunteers on duty depending on the time of day, working three-hour shifts during the week, with longer hours on weekends.

"The volunteers are really the core of the Ronald McDonald House," said Little. "If we didn't have volunteers, obviously we couldn't operate."

Currently the schedule is set using a large desk calendar, notebooks and printouts.

Though all volunteers have set hours they work, an illness or emergency can cause problems.

The new system will be centralized and accessible over the Internet.

"This is going to allow us to not have quite so many errors and will do a lot of the legwork," she said.

Becky Neidetcher, who has volunteered at the house since its opening in 1995, said organizing the schedule can be a long and tedious process.

Neidetcher has had to work on the schedule many times. Though administrative work is part of the job, volunteers are primarily responsible for things like welcoming guests, straightening rooms and sometimes making meals, she said.

Neidetcher said she'll be happy to give up working on the calendar to get back to those other jobs.

"The little daily tasks that seem pretty commonplace have to be done," she said. "That's how the house runs."

Tucker and his team have taken information from the Ronald McDonald House to build a database and framework for a calendar program similar to Apple's iCal or Google Calendar.

The scheduler would become part of a growing field of open-source software that includes popular programs like the Mozilla Firefox Internet browser and the Linux computer operating system.

Oliver Radwan, a senior computer science major who is working on the project, said the finished software will act as a calendar, scheduler and volunteer manager.

Not only will the calendar be accessible to people through the...