[hackerspaces] How do you do accounting, membership, access, etc?

[Will Bradley]

Hello from HeatSync Labs!

Dues payments come in through PayPal, recurring checks, and to a lesser
extent Dwolla and cash/Square. We strongly encourage recurring payments.

Money is tracked by the Treasurer (a human) who records things in
QuickBooks; we also have a CPA.

Our delinquency reports are severely lacking and I'm in the process of
auditing for the first time in months.

New members are sent an email with links and given an in-person training;
our website and its link to Google Groups is emphasized repeatedly.

Members don't automatically get card access, but when they do they are
manually added to the RFID door lock system (23b's Open Access Control) via
SSH/serial.

Login credentials for Mediawiki are available freely now that we installed
security question plugins, and our Wordpress blog has been relatively
lacking in participation but we have given out logins.

----------

I agree there is a need for The Ultimate Hackerspace Software however our
own effort has stalled (https://github.com/hackerspacemanagement/) -- the
objectives you mentioned are on my todo list. I've got an incredibly
hackish version of the OAC software which is network-enabled as a first
step towards synchronizing.(
https://github.com/zyphlar/Open_Access_Control_Ethernet) We also have
written Ruby serial code to give a basic locking/unlocking/status API to
the space since we use maglocks. (
https://github.com/zyphlar/Open-Source-Access-Control---Web-Interface)

I'd love nothing more than to get some simple, pop-in code for the OAC
hardware for user account syncing, plus a simple membership management
software (delinquency, etc.) If you've got energy to do it, feel free to
contact me offlist.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.hackerspaces.org/pipermail/discuss/attachments/20120808/5ed660fd/attachment.html>