[Linux-aus] Candidacy Support Statement - President or Ordinary Council Member

[Stewart Smith]

On Wed, Dec 7, 2016, at 07:53 PM, Andrew Bartlett wrote:
> On Wed, 2016-12-07 at 02:33 -0500, David Lloyd wrote:
> >  
> > You’ve limped along without a $23K CRM until now; I really can’t see
> > how CiviCRM or SugarCRM (which is actually less hassle to setup than
> > CiviCRM and has a backer less likely to disappear) costs $23K.
> >  
> > Let me make a counter proposal: employ someone whose cost and expense
> > is $17,000 to work with the currenct systems. You’ve just saved
> > $6,000.
> 
> G'Day David,
> 
> Can you flesh this out a bit more?  I understand from the tread that
> the MemberDB author (Stewart Smith if I recall) suggested that moving
> to CiviCRM.

Yep, it is/was me!

I've been wishing that either myself or someone else would find the
spare time to write/migrate the voting system to CiviCRM for some
time... but it's just proved too much of a task to fit in around the
rest of things.
 
> As someone working professionally in open source software development
> for hire, my general experience is that $17,000 at
> consultant/contractor rates doesn't buy much in terms of a major
> software overhaul, which seems to be what is requested.  It certainly
> seems from the things Kathy described as limitations that we are beyond
> minor just works.

Exactly.

There is no minor rework of MemberDB here, it's absolutely the best web
application a systems programmer came up with in their mostly spare time
13-16 years ago.

Personally, I'm amazed it's lasted this long - but the state of the art
in other systems has come such a long way, and LA has enough resources
to employ somebody to write free software to adapt other systems to
modern requirements.


> My main thought on your proposal is that Linux Australia would end up
> with the execution risk (is the money spent well, regression, etc) and
> keep the maintenance burden of a bespoke system, rather than having a
> vendor with an SLA and a quoted migration price.  That could easily eat
> up any 'savings'. 
> 
> Given LA is an organisation turning over 1millon per year, paying for a
> few things in the services area, particularly if it avoids paying staff
> to push paper around and do things manually, seems very good value.

I heartily agree. When I first set up MemberDB for LA, I think we were
about an order of magnitude smaller? Certainly so in events being held
(there was just LCA).