[OSMF-membership] Managing OSMF membership using CiviCRM

Jonathan Bennett jonobennett at gmail.com
Wed Jan 7 13:56:48 UTC 2015


On 07/01/2015 12:26, 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?
>
> I'm not trying to pre-judge the issue here; it may be that a proprietary
> system might not be possible for technical, or legal, or financial
> reasons. But on the other hand, if a proprietary membership solution
> existed and was suitable, it would solve the "key man getting hit by a
> bus" problem and allow us to get on with the next steps - avoiding the
> "opportunity cost" and ongoing maintenance effort of self hosting.

On a practical level, self-hosting is more busproof than using an 
outside service, since the system will sit on hardware OSMF controls, 
run by people who run the rest of OSMF's services. Put another way, if 
*that* infrastructure has a low bus factor, OpenStreetMap as a project 
has far greater problems than a membership management system.

The incremental cost of self-hosting is essentially nil: OSMF already 
owns the hardware (regular server upgrades ensure a steady supply of 
idle less-powerful hardware), the people involved are already working on 
keeping many servers and services running (and have developed ways of 
reducing the amount of human effort involved e.g. Chef), and it's based 
on software we're already running elsewhere for other purposes (WordPress).

There have also been concerns expressed by OSMF members in the past 
about the use of third-party services -- some OSMF activities make use 
of Google applications, for example -- and see it as a potential privacy 
problem. Self-hosting makes this a non-issue.

Putting my CWG hat on for a second, self-hosting also allows OSMF to 
present all its member services and interaction at a single, seamless 
site, as oppossed to being redirected back and forth between a number of 
servers and services. This is better for both usability and search 
engine-friendliness.

Given all this, I believe we should have a *presumption* of 
self-hosting, unless an alternative provides such a significant benefit 
to override this. During my investigations I found no such alternatives. 
If you can find one we should consider it, but that needs to be done 
quite soon.

J.




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