[OSMF-membership] Managing OSMF membership using CiviCRM

Jonathan Bennett jonobennett at gmail.com
Tue Jan 6 16:39:35 UTC 2015


On 06/01/2015 13:37, Jonathan Harley wrote:
> Hi Jonathan, and everyone, I think it would be a good idea to dig into
> what problems the OSMF does face before continuing.

The immediate ones related to membership appeared to be:

 From the member's PoV:
* "Is my membership still current?"
* "If so, when does it expire?"
Up to this point these questions require people to email the membership 
secretary and wait a manually-generated reply.

Signing up/renewing also required a two-step process by the member: Pay, 
and email the membership secretary to say you'd paid.

 From the foundation's PoV:
* Having everything done manually and apparently offline meant a low 
Busproofing factor for the whole membership process
* The list of ordinary members wasn't easily available to anyone except 
the membership secretary, so fulfulling our legal requirements was 
harder than it could be
* The osmf-talk mailing list needed to be manually edited when members 
joined/left to ensure members and only members could post (anyone can 
read the archives)

> It might also be helpful to know what other investigation you did?

I found no other software/service that allowed OSMF to manage membership 
and allow self-service sign-ups, could be self-hosted and had an active 
community supporting it. Some off-the-top-of-my-head recollections:

* SugarCRM's open source edition is limited in functionality, and some 
features we need (e.g. i18n) are only present in the paid, hosted version
* Various Drupal-based modules allow you to assemble your own CRM 
system, but need integration work to even function, and obviously only 
work on Drupal, which OSMF doesn't use for anything else. None of these 
systems had any significant level of traction.
* Salesforce.com is obviously proprietary, doesn't seem to have a truly 
free option and needs you to jump through hoops to even qualify for 
their discount programme


> Can it allow users to change between full and associate membership?
> Wasn't there a recent change to allow free memberships, can that be
> handled?

Yes and yes - they're both trivial changes made easily in the admin 
interface. Users can change their class of membership on renewal. 
What's more, any change like this is logged, so we can see who made the 
change and when (and if someone subsequently changes it back).

> Any idea who we could talk to about how they use it? Richard, do you know?

I think Ian Dees set it up, but Serge may know more.

> I know I'd be interested. Dave and I have been talking about how to
> define the scope of the working group.

Once I'd started looking into Civi, I realised there are many of its 
features that would be useful to the OSMF, but not all necessarily fall 
under the remit of a "membership" WG. For instance, it can manage:

* Events, e.g. Stage of the Map, handling cost structure, sign-ups and 
attendee lists
* Corporate members, and conferring rights/benefits on employees of 
those companies
* Standalone fundraising campaigns like server purchases
* Other campaigns, e.g. advocacy - this heads into CWG territory, where 
I originally started on this
* Making grants to individuals/organisations -- this could be funding 
for a sub-project of OSM. Frederik may be able to say more about if & 
how this has been done in the past.

Some of these things would be new activities, or significant 
developments on existing activities, but if it helps OSMF achieve more 
as an organisation then that should improve our relationship with our 
members.

J.




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