Thinking about Content Types: People and Organizations

Two of the data-structures that we will manage are People and Organizations. People may or may not be actual users of the site, so we'll want to keep them separate. However it would be nice to link each user account to a People record. Mainly we want a People (or should I call it Person?) record to have a Name, a set of contact methods, and track membership in Organizations. I'd like to track the county that they live/operate in primarily. We'd also like to track their Amateur Radio call-sign and class.

Other features that we'd like to add down the road are the ability to "friend" or link People/Persons as well as integrate with other social media easily. There's no reason to re-invent facebook or linkedin, but I know that some folks might not use those services, so having a subset tracked here as well might be handy for getting introductions or making contact when there is a real need.

Organizations are a bit fuzzier still. I see them as mainly a Name, and a set of members. Perhaps one of the members is marked as a representative or contact person. Or should organizations also have Organizational contact information? They should have a mission statement/description, and a list of counties that they operate in, or are responsible for.

For contact information, should I force every record to have a static list of contact information (e.g. email, phone, twitter) or would it be better to remain flexible, and simply have contact be a pair of contact-type (email, phone, twitter) and the value (email address, phone number, twitter handle) That way when I need to add a new content type I just have to update the taxonomy vocabulary for contact-type. However this may make views and lists a bit harder to manage, unless I can make a tiered approach. I'm going to try it with this more flexible method now and worry about reporting hurdles later.