[OSMF-membership] Managing OSMF membership using CiviCRM

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 01/07/2015 01:26 PM, Jonathan Harley wrote:
> One thing I note that isn't on your list, is a requirement for a free, 
> open source, self-hostable system. Are those generally a requirement of 
> the board? Or has the board discussed having a policy about that in the 
> past, to your knowledge?

The board doesn't currently have such a policy, but it should.

I'm trying not to be fundamentalist here - getting work done is usually
the important bit and those who do the work get to choose their tools.
But it is clear that our membership is leaning towards "open" and
whenever there's an option of going the open route we should attempt
that. Supporting the "proprietary" model in other spheres while
advocating "open" for geodata chips away at our credibility as an
organisation, in my opinion, and we should only do that where there is a
large and clear benefit to us.

The main reasons against a proprietary system in this particular case
are, IMHO, that we'd tie ourselves to one supplier and be subject to
*their* bus factor (startups, and even Google services, can die
quickly), and that we cannot take things in our own hands.

I've done some asking around about membership management too and it
seems that CiviCRM is the most widely used thing so I don't think we can
go too wrong with that (or at least we'll find others having the same
problems as we do).

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"