[OSMF-membership] Managing OSMF membership using CiviCRM

[Serge Wroclawski]

On Thu, Jan 8, 2015 at 7:27 AM, Jonathan Harley <jon at spiffymap.net> wrote:
> On 07/01/15 13:04, Simon Poole wrote:

>> 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).
>>
>
> I feel producing a spec at the start is useful both to guide implementation
> and to help get everyone on a team on the same page.
>
> However, if nobody else here agrees with me, I will shut up and get out of
> the way.

I've worked with three other non-profits that are similar to the OSMF
in ethos (Free Software and or Free Culture groups), and we're gone
through the excercise each time looking for CRM programs, and each
time, after lots of searching, CiviCRM comes to the top.

It's not that people love CiviCRM, but CiviCRM has so much support for
so many different workflows. An organization specs something out, but
then it invariably wants more out of the software. CiviCRM was the
most flexible, and had the largest user community of people who had
already implemented the same kinds of tasks.

>> 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.
>
> Could you elaborate on this? How is Google mining the OSMF membership data,
> and how many OSMF members are we losing?

There have been people who have stated publically that they don't like
OSM membership data being stored on Google, and even amongst those who
don't have the explicit concerns about Google mining our user data,
there are some (like me) who would be most comfortable if OSMF
business was in the hands of the OSMF and not some third party.


I feel like this issue of "What we'll use" and "Where we'll run it"
has largely been decided, especially by those who have already
volunteered to run it.

Is there something about this decision that you actively disagree with?

- Serge