[hackerspaces] Member and event management systems

Sat Sep 10 12:34:45 CEST 2016

I've started one here: https://github.com/altinukshini/hackerspacecrm
But it'll take some time to be useful. I'll be working on it for another
year for sure as it's also a school project and we need for Prishtina
Hackerspace too (we use Seltzer)

Cheers,
Altin

Sent from my phone. Please excuse any typos.

On Sep 10, 2016 4:30 AM, "Edward L Platt" <ed at elplatt.com> wrote:

> 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
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> Discuss mailing listDiscuss at lists.hackerspaces.orghttp://lists.hackerspaces.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
>>>>>
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>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list
>>>> Discuss at lists.hackerspaces.org http://lists.hackerspaces.org/
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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.
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Discuss mailing listDiscuss at lists.hackerspaces.orghttp://lists.hackerspaces.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Discuss mailing list
>>> Discuss at lists.hackerspaces.org
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>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Discuss mailing list
>> Discuss at lists.hackerspaces.org
>> http://lists.hackerspaces.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
>>
>>
>
>
> --
> 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.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Discuss mailing list
> Discuss at lists.hackerspaces.org
> http://lists.hackerspaces.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
>
>
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