Open source village/community management system

[Kamal_S_Prasad]

Serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in rural Zambia, I saw the detrimental lack of good record keeping of farmers that led to uncertain ROIs (return on investment). That gave me an idea to create a record keeping system to help farmers see how profitable their farms are and track yields/sales over years. Since I was working on a farming record keeping system I thought it might be a good idea to incorporate other features in the system to provide a holistic overview of a community small community.

I’m sharing the alpha release of the (free and open source) software here in case other communities may find this useful and to solicit feedback on the system. If anyone has questions, I’d be happy to address them as well. I hope this proves useful to the community.

Github Repo

You can find all the code, requirements and set up instructions at: GitHub - kamalsprasad/village-management: An open-source web platform to transform independent communities from memory-based operations into data-driven, systematically managed operations. · GitHub

Live Demo

https://village.ideacollab.app

Field	Value
Email	brian@village.app
Password	Village_app2026

The demo runs on sample data for the Katete Model Village. Data will be reset periodically.

Roadmap

35 of 50 MVP features complete (70%)

Status	Epic	Highlights
Complete	Foundation	Auth, RBAC, Households, Residents, Dashboard
Complete	Finance	Income/expense tracking, lending, reports
Complete	Inventory	Core inventory, auto-stock from purchases
Complete	Farm	Plot management, planting→harvest→sales, profitability & yield analysis
Next	School	Student registration, grades, attendance (not started)
Planned	Calendar	Events, resource bookings
Planned	Storage	Documents, media, forms

Screenshots

[ohiofarmmuseum]

Keeping in mind that there is a vast difference between being a farmer and being an intentional community that farms. As a farmer for 70+ years now, my experience is that it is much cheaper, and efficient, to hire help. It costs much more having volunteers and/or communitarians come live here. But, making more money, spending money more efficiently, having ease of farm operation, is often not the point of IC’s. By joining in community, instead of just best practice free enterprise, there are untold and often uncounted non-monetary benefits. Such as teaching others how to do what you do. Or just the pure entertainment of having (usually) fun folks around. Or the altruistic working on a goal together. I have lost fairly large amounts of money inviting folks here. It’s not cheap feeding the “masses”. Or clothing them. Or entertaining them. Or providing housing (We do all that.) But, what is life for? For me, it is far more fun living with folks than having bank accounts. ~~~What you are offering seems a fine idea. Thank you. But, for me, nickels and dimes have never been the point. I really have never cared if I was in poverty (often) or well off (sometimes). Much more important was being peaceful about it all.

[Kamal_S_Prasad]

I’ve added a video tutorial/walkthrough on how to setup this up yourself. You can find it here: https://youtu.be/chT54P2n3b8?si=jVTQt02akGSYxHOY

[Kamal_S_Prasad]

Thank you for your feedback. I appreciate the desire to build a community without worrying about nickels and dimes. However, for a community to persist, it has to be sustainable, right? And that does require some planning and recording keeping to ensure that limited resources are being used efficiently. This system isn’t for everybody. But it may help some.