[hackerspaces] Member and event management systems

[Edward L Platt]

It's worth mentioning that several of us worked on developing a
free/open-source system to do this called Seltzer, with mixed success. It
never made it to 1.0, but has been successfully used at a number of spaces.
The project is currently maintenance-only, but I do plan to devote more
effort to decentralized free/open software for organizing communities at
some point.

It's a hard problem, but mostly for non-technical reasons. Some challenges
we found that might not be obvious:

1. It's not a sexy topic, so it's hard to attract volunteers, and it's hard
to raise money.

2. On a related note, member management systems are long-term projects,
which means whatever stack you build the technology on, it will spend most
of it's life cycle being "old, boring" technology.

3. Everyone does things differently. One approach is to build a tool that
can be configured to do anything (CiviCRM is a good example) but the
downside is that it gets very complicated and difficult to use. Another
approach is to make a lightweight core that can be extended (we tried this
with Seltzer).

4. It's difficult to build collaborations across spaces. Different spaces
stumble across or create their own solutions, which makes pooling resources
difficult.

Happy hacking,
Ed

On Fri, Sep 9, 2016 at 10:01 PM, Derek H <dh405okc at gmail.com> wrote:

> How does one request an invite to that slack?
>
> On Fri, Sep 9, 2016 at 8:56 PM, Matthew "mirage335" Hines <
> spamfreemirage335 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> National Organization of Makers is the name increasingly adopted by the
>> large group of Makerspace leaders continuing to collaborate following the
>> recent White House sponsored meeting, as well as a possible future
>> conference with a similar agenda.
>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Didwk6Td7M
>>
>>
>> On 09/09/16 09:48 PM, Edward L Platt wrote:
>>
>> What is the National Organization of Makers?
>>
>> On Fri, Sep 9, 2016 at 8:46 PM, Joshua Pritt <ramgarden at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Melbourne Makerspace has been using the open source Seltzer (built at
>>> another hackerspace!) specifically for running 'spaces with little to no
>>> training and volunteer time.
>>> I am currently trying to build a member photo module that lets other
>>> members pull up the photos of a selected member since we have so many
>>> members now it's hard to remember their names!
>>>
>>> https://github.com/elplatt/seltzer
>>>
>>> I wrote some PHP that queries the Seltzer database that is called from a
>>> Python script I wrote that runs on a raspberry Pi with an RFID scanner we
>>> use for our front door lock.
>>> It's been working great for over a year now!
>>>
>>> https://wiki.melbournemakerspace.org/projects/RFIDDoorLock
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Fri, Sep 9, 2016 at 8:15 PM, Matthew "mirage335" Hines <
>>> spamfreemirage335 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> You may wish to request an invite to the National Organization of
>>>> Makers slack channel. This has been recognized as a unsolved problem in
>>>> need of dedicated technology. An active development effort is underway to
>>>> begin an extensive Odoo based platform without lock-in.
>>>>
>>>> On 09/09/16 08:03 PM, Dominic Canare wrote:
>>>>
>>>> It's been a little while since we talked about this, and I wonder if
>>>> new information or tools are available.
>>>>
>>>> What are people using to manage their members, payments, equipment
>>>> authorizations, events and signups, donations, etc?
>>>>
>>>> We've been using WildApricot for the past few years. It does many
>>>> things, but all of them are a little lacking. We have a bunch of
>>>> work-arounds and custom tools built around their API's to make it easier
>>>> for our administrators, but it's become a bit cumbersome to maintain, and
>>>> the price keeps going up.
>>>>
>>>> Looking for suggestions!
>>>>
>>>> *Dominic Canare*
>>>> Immediate Past President, MakeICT
>>>>
>>>>
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>>
>> --
>> Edward L. Platt
>> PhD student, University of Michigan School of Information
>> https://elplatt.com
>> @elplatt <http://twitter.com/elplatt>
>> KC1DYK
>> Tips for stopping email overload: https://hbr.org/2012
>> /02/stop-email-overload-1
>> This digital electronic mail message was sent from my general-purpose
>> desktop personal computing machine.  Please forgive any overly-verbose,
>> long-winded, rambling prose.
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>>
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>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Discuss mailing list
> Discuss at lists.hackerspaces.org
> http://lists.hackerspaces.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
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>


-- 
Edward L. Platt
PhD student, University of Michigan School of Information
https://elplatt.com
@elplatt <http://twitter.com/elplatt>
KC1DYK

Tips for stopping email overload:
https://hbr.org/2012/02/stop-email-overload-1

This digital electronic mail message was sent from my general-purpose
desktop personal computing machine.  Please forgive any overly-verbose,
long-winded, rambling prose.
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