July 28th, 2010Most days, data is pretty straightforward to us here at OpenIssue headquarters. Names, addresses, email addresses, the pesky notes field (today’s bane of our existence.) But sometimes, data is political. Or, I guess more accurately, data models.
In most CRM systems, especially older ones, and ones that are less flexible, some fields can be points of contention for some of us. Gender is one, marital status is another.
CiviCRM, to it’s credit, allows for an arbitrary number of genders – you can define them however you like. My bet (although I could be wrong) is that it’s one of the few out there that allow that. Gender is not a standard field in Salesforce.com contact records, so if you want to add your own, you can customize it however you’d like. There was a very interesting and lively discussion about the gender field in Drupal profiles. Of course, one can always customize these things in Drupal.
For a couple of projects we’ve been working on, we’ve been getting very interested in putting together a really expanded and fleshed out data model for gender, sexual orientation, and marital status. Here’s the first draft. We’d love feedback on this (besides “this is silly/too radical/dangerous/from the antichrist/etc.”). And we also know that even for those who agree that sex and gender are different things, people will differ on how to divide these categories and make sense of it.
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