Could Obsidian Canvas be used as a lightweight church volunteer/assignment tracker?

Hi everyone,

I'm still fairly new to Obsidian and have only a basic understanding of Canvas, Dataview, and some community plugins. I have an idea that I think might be possible in Obsidian, but I'm not sure whether I'm approaching it the right way.

Our church has several committees and sub-organisations, and I'm part of the programme committee that plans weekly youth fellowships. Every week we need to assign people to different roles such as Keyboardist, Worship Leader, MC, Scripture Reader, Usher, Sound, and others.

The biggest challenge is not finding someone who can play the keyboard. It's remembering who has already been serving recently.

For example, if I'm looking for someone to be the Keyboardist for the next four weeks, I'd like to quickly see things like:

• Has this person recently served as a Keyboardist?
• Even if they haven't played the keyboard recently, have they been serving in other roles such as Usher, MC, or Scripture Reader?
• Are they already heavily involved in another committee?
• Who hasn't had an opportunity to serve for a while?

I started wondering whether Obsidian Canvas could be used as a visual way to connect people, committees, events, and roles. My thought was that each person could have a note, each event could have a note, and assignments would gradually build a history that could be viewed either visually or through queries.

I've already experimented with this idea, but my knowledge of Obsidian is quite limited, and I'm beginning to wonder if I'm forcing Canvas to do something it wasn't designed for.

Before I spend more time on it, I'd love to hear from people who know Obsidian much better than I do.

• Does this sound like a reasonable use case for Obsidian?
• Would Canvas actually be useful here, or would you approach it completely differently?
• Are there plugins or workflows that would make this much easier?
• Has anyone built something similar for volunteer scheduling, committee management, or recurring role assignments?

I'm not looking for a full scheduling system. I simply want a lightweight way to keep historical context so our committee can make fairer decisions instead of relying on memory.

I'd really appreciate any thoughts or suggestions. Thanks!

PS: I don't know how to ask the question, I use AI to help me write it.