[OSMF-membership] Managing OSMF membership using CiviCRM

[Simon Poole]

[note I volunteered for this group on a rather narrowly defined task]

While the board has at least formally never had a FOSS strategy, the
issue has been breached in the SWG and in general is a touchy topic with
the OSM community, further we are now having our membership data mined
by google and are loosing members at least in data privacy aware
communities because of that. Similar concerns are likely to apply to any
hosted CRM solution that do not provide us full control over the data.

CivicCRM was AFAIK originally selected by Henk way back because OSM-US
had already started using it and in general it seems to be the only FOSS
solution geared towards non-profits and addressing issues like fund
raising etc. besides membership management. It runs on top of a platform
that we are already running (WordPress).

Now we could embark on producing a full spec and going in to a
evaluation process, but all in all I think that it would be more
realistic and expedient to simply get the experience with CivicCRM and
punt anything else to a potential 2nd round of automation down the road
(right now I don't believe that we could produce anything reasonable as
a spec that isn't simüly a gigantic wish-list).

The OSMF has a small number of members and even an order of magnitude
more would still be a small number. It is unlikely that we will be
taxing any potential replacement for what we have now in any significant
way, so I wouldn't be too concerned about crossing all t's and dotting
all i's for this round.

Simon


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