This Django app implements a system for scheduling regular volunteer shifts (at a daycare). It consists of two primary functionality groups, People and Scheduling.

An instance of this application runs for a given daycare. The instance organizes its human participants like so:

• Administrator per daycare
• classrooms per daycare
• Teachers per classroom
• Schedulers per classroom
• children per classroom
• Parents per child (who will be volunteers)

The app represents a person playing any of the capitalized roles as a User. A User may play any number of these roles; and can play a given role more than once (e.g., be a scheduler and parent in one classroom and a parent of another child in another classrooms).

The app always designates one role as active for each User, presenting a menu to toggle between roles and correspondingly sets of available views. Permissions generally derive from which role is active, with help from the django-rules package.

To begin populating the app, the Administrator initializes the application instance for a given daycare, creates classrooms and invites a Scheduler for each classroom. The Scheduler begins adding Teachers, children and Parents to their classroom by entering an email address for each Teacher, a name (or nickname) for each child, and email addresses for the child's Caregivers. If the email address already corresponds to a User, the user accepts their new role (as teacher or parent). Otherwise, the site generates an signup invite message, so that signup licensed by the corresponding token attaches (through the Django Signals framework) the roles to the resulting new user instance.

Before each period of shifts to be scheduled, the classroom scheduler creates the new period (by entering its date boundaries and holidays), and generates a shift preference solicitation email to the caregivers. This email links to a web form to rank the family's preferred shifts; all caregivers of a given child share the same preference set. Having collected preferences from all responsible families, the scheduler assigns shifts to families in a two-step process.

1. Choose from the resulting generated ranked list of optimal assignments of repeating time slots (say, alternate Wednesday afternoons).

2. Given the chosen time slot assignment, choose an assignment of shift commitments for each family (say, 2pm on Sept 5, Sep 19, ...).

After any final manual tweaks, the Scheduler sends the calendar to Parents. Throughout the scheduled period, Parents can revise any of their individual commitments until some fixed interval before the shift starts. Revisions to a family's schedule generate notifications (through the Signals framework) for all users in the family.

The app presents to a Teacher the resulting schedule of shift commitments, plus an attendance scoresheet visible to the Teachers and to the Administrator.