To the Board of Directors and Executive Director of the Oregon Country Fair (OCF):

We are writing collectively to ask that the Sunshine Database be fully retired after the 2024 OCF event.  We feel that this database for reasons outlined below has not served its purpose and that further efforts to improve upon it are unwelcome and likely futile.  Our recommendation is to explore options for other volunteer databases already in existence leading into the 2025 OCF season.  

1.  Sunshine is extremely user unfriendly.  It is very difficult to accomplish even the simplest of functions.  We do not feel extensive training or lengthy videos should be needed for a platform like this and that it should be generally intuitive in this day and age.  There are existing databases that would work well for OCF.
2.  Some of us are experienced programmers and IT professionals and believe the database to be easily hacked.  We do not want to face this risk as volunteers - our own information and that of our family/SOs/teen volunteers should be better protected.  We are uncomfortable sending our financial information through this platform yet we are required to do so.
3.  Many of us have encountered rudeness and condescension (rather than help) when asking for help using the database.  There have been regular accusations of user incompetence rather than admission of database malfunction.
4.  It is often difficult to log in.  This occurs in large enough numbers that it is unlikely user error.
5.  It is unclear if the creator of the database is being paid, but as a volunteer Board member, we are concerned this is a conflict of interest to financially benefit from a decision over which one has influence.  We ask that this conflict of interest be directly addressed at a future board meeting as it would be counter to laws governing nonprofits.
6.  Crew leaders dedicate a large number of volunteer hours leading up to the event to prepare their crews of up to hundreds of people every year.  They do it with joy, skill, and irreplaceable diligence.  Most of them have had an outrageous and unplanned increase in the hours needed just to help their crew get through the database - time taken away from the actual work of training and readying their crew for their important work.  

The burden should be on the BOD and ED to demonstrate the viability of a platform in use.  Other than sharing our concerns here with the attached signatures, we should not have to prove this to you further.  You have received considerable specific feedback already and not addressed it.  

We are volunteers who proudly share many hours of our time to support OCF, something we believe in and greatly need as a community, now more than ever.  We are an amazing force of highly skilled disciplines that show up year after year.  As a show of support to your volunteer work force, please believe us and act on the fact that Sunshine should be permanently retired after this OCF season and all of its user data wiped from storage.