[OSMF-membership] Managing OSMF membership using CiviCRM

[Serge Wroclawski]

I don't know who set things up for OSM US- that's after my time on the
OSM US board.

I do know that organizations I work with closely use CiviCRM, and it's
been on my "To Learn" list for a long time.

- Serge

On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 11:39 AM, Jonathan Bennett <jonobennett at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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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