[OSMF-membership] Managing OSMF membership using CiviCRM

[Jonathan Harley]

On 08/01/15 13:32, Simon Poole wrote:
>
> Am 08.01.2015 um 13:27 schrieb Jonathan Harley:
>> On 07/01/15 13:04, Simon Poole wrote:
>>> 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,
> All data submitted to google can and is used (at least) to improve their
> ad placement. It has been the subject of high profile court cases and
> media coverage. This is not specific to OSM, they do it to everybody.
> This effects anything stored with google and all e-mail sent via/to
> their systems (they have however backed off a bit on the later).

Are you saying that the OSMF membership list is held on google docs? I'm 
pretty sure it's not - when I was sent a copy for vote-scrutineering 
purposes it was a MS Excel document attached to email. I assumed that 
meant it's held on Henk's laptop or something, not on google. Do you (or 
anyone else here) know different?

>> and how many OSMF members are we losing?
> We obviously can't quantify it, but there are regular complaints at
> least on the German speaking mailing lists and forums.

That's quite a stretch, isn't it, from "there have been complaints on 
German lists" to "we are losing members"?

I don't like google's data-mining either and I don't use google docs; 
and I was uncomfortable when we used them for organising SotM but I was 
in a minority. I don't think we should use google. I do understand the 
feeling in the community but I'm reluctant to extend that to "we must 
never use commercial software".

>> ...
>>> 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.
>>
> My point was not to not produce a spec, but get some experience with a
> system that is likely to cover a very large part of our needs. Down the
> road when we get a better grasp of things and if we run out of steam
> with CiviCRM then I would think everybody would support a more formal
> procedure, but right now we are just trying to replace a google
> spreadsheet and we don't even have any first hand or documented
> experience with that  :-).
>

I don't think it's a google spreadsheet, but if it is, we can fix that 
problem in five minutes by switching it to an openoffice spreadsheet, 
emailed (preferably encrypted) to whoever needs it (preferably with a 
version number that gets incremented every time a change is made). Or 
shared via dropbox or similar. Or perhaps there's already something set 
up for sharing files on the OSM servers?

Jon.


-- 
Dr Jonathan Harley   :    Managing Director    :   SpiffyMap Ltd

jon at spiffymap.net     mobile: 07590 024028     www.spiffymap.com
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