[hackerspaces] Member and event management systems

Sat Sep 10 21:20:45 CEST 2016

Can we move questions/discussion about National Organization of Makers to a
separate thread?

Our primary needs including handling automatic recurring dues payments and
event registrations and payments - preferably with more options than
PayPal, as we have a number of members who refuse to use it or it's
problematic. The system needs to supports event discounts for active
members and allows monthly-addons for dues (such as an additional monthly
donation, locker rentals, etc).

We looked at Seltzer in the past, but I don't think it had any support for
events and RSVP's. Looks like that's still the case?

*Dominic Canare*
Immediate Past President, MakeICT

On Sat, Sep 10, 2016 at 8:57 AM, bownes <bownes at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> At the Center of Gravity we use Seltzer with quite a few add ons to handle
> badges, access control, and billing.
>
> The On Sep 10, 2016, at 07:45, Arthur Guy <arthur at arthurguy.co.uk> wrote:
>
> I built a system for the Brighton (England) Makerspace a few years back.
> Its very specific to us but it has a good feature set and is forkable.
> https://github.com/ArthurGuy/BBMembershipSystem/
>
>
> Thanks,
> Arthur
>
> On 10 September 2016 at 11:34, Altin Ukshini <altin.ukshini at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> 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
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing
>>>>>>> list Discuss at lists.hackerspaces.org http://lists.hackerspaces.org/
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>>>>>>
>>>>>> _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list
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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
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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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>> Discuss at lists.hackerspaces.org
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>>
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>
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