Create a worker that synchronizes with an instance of the PDC for base fields

[slifty]

No description provided.

[bickelj]

@slifty Is it like the following? There exists a PDC instance somewhere that we treat as canonical (cough) and whatever data state it has we treat that data as canonical and connect to it to get the most up-to-date base fields? In other words, there is no way to recreate from code the state of base fields at all?

[slifty]

Essentially yes -- we would not have seed data in this repository. We would want to have database backups so as not to lose the data in PDC production, but overall base fields are user data and really ought not to be in the domain of developers at all / the code base should be agnostic to them.

[bickelj]

More thought required. I wish it were so simple to say "data are not our jam" but experience proves otherwise.

[slifty]

Sure! We can keep talking about it -- there was a fair bit of work done to design base field admin interfaces, though they haven't been implemented yet (e.g. PhilanthropyDataCommons/front-end#516)

Our ownership of base fields was a function of the tooling we had in place in early stages of the project, and even if we do own it I think that ownership should be in a third party repository / we should manage them via the API as API clients.

[bickelj]

@slifty OK, that helps me put it together more. If we have an admin interface on the front-end to edit base fields (which is fantastic, by the way) it makes sense to synchronize instead of trying to recreate state from code.