[OSMF-membership] Managing OSMF membership using CiviCRM

[Jonathan Bennett]

Happy New Year everyone.

One of the issues with OSMF membership up to this point has been the 
manual nature of the sign-up and renewal process. After some 
investigation I think adopting CiviCRM for the OSMF will solve this 
problem (and possibly many others the foundation faces).

To cut a long story short* I've been working on a test installation for 
the OSMF since last year, but had to put things on hold for a while. 
I've now got things to a stage where self-service individual membership 
is functional, but ugly.

You can try it out at https://crm.osmfoundation.org/join-the-osmf/ - 
it's in test mode so you can enter dummy credit card details to complete 
the sign-up.

Corporate membership is configured in the CiviCRM back-end, but there 
are no self-service pages for it as yet - applications would need to be 
handled manually for the time being.

CiviCRM does seem to be a good fit for the OSMF -- it's FLOSS, it can 
handle memberships, events (e.g. SotM), campaigns (e.g. the quasi-annual 
server fundraising drive), and OSM-US is already using it with (I 
believe) some measure of success.

If no-one objects, I think we should press ahead with getting this 
system live for new sign-ups, with existing members added to the system 
shortly afterwards.

Some things that need to happen before or around launch:

* Design (i.e. it needs one)
* Improve the copy for the site and the various automated emails the 
system generates
* Internationalisation

Does anyone have any thoughts at this stage? I will try to recruit some 
of the designers who have contributed to osm.org, unless anyone already 
here fancies taking that on?

I can also elaborate more about how OSMF can use CiviCRM, but I figured 
this message is already long enough.

Thoughts?


Jonathan


*I've been involved in the Communications Working Group for a few years, 
and when it was working well we often discussed improving the materials 
around OSMF membership, but my memory is that some of the problems we 
saw were with the process as much as the words used around it. I had 
reason to investigate CiviCRM for another organisation I'm involved in, 
and at some face-to-face event in London (i.e. the pub) I chatted about 
it with Tom Hughes. He revealed a previous test installation, but based 
on Drupal, whereas I'd been investigating using WordPress as the host 
CMS. I volunteered to restart the work for OSMF, Tom checked this was OK 
with the board and we went ahead.