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

[Hugh Blemings]

Hi Russell, All,

On 9/12/2016 14:49, Russell Stuart wrote:
> On Fri, 2016-12-09 at 13:08 +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
>> $15 a month and $20 upfront via civihosting.com gets you a system
>> with CiviCRM pre-installed, and presumably able to be immediately
>> used by someone with basic CiviCRM admin skills.
>
> Oh.  Presumably LA would need basic CiviCRM admin skills for it to be
> useful at all.  If they don't have them now CiviCRM training is cheap
> as you point out.

So I guess this was something I'd be hoping that whoever steps up will 
have or be able to acquire.  We don't (afaik) have the requisite CiviCRM 
(or whichever platform) admin skills.  Council doesn't have the bandwidth.

Hence the (sincere) call for volunteers :)

> On Fri, 2016-12-09 at 13:58 +1100, Hugh Blemings wrote:
>> We would like two or three members to volunteer to install and run a
>> replacement Membership/CRM style management system for a minimum
>> period of two years.  It needs to be something demonstrably well
>> integrated, user friendly and with a broad community of support of
>> the underlying codebase.
>
> Assuming LA is prepared to pay the $15/mo instead of using volunteers,
> is this now fulfilled?  There is still the issue of replacing MemberDB
> voting of course, but presumably you could use both for a year or so.
> It's just a web site so the results would be visible to the membership.
>  That would eliminate most of the speculative arguments occurring now.

I don't have the cycles to evaluate or make a complete list.  Off the 
top of my head though, in addition to basic hosting we need;

* Basic install, security patching whatever of $NEWCRMSYSTEM
* Assurance that the data stays within an Australian hosted DC
* Customisation of the site to LA requirements
* ETL of existing data
* Testing
* Ongoing maintenance, tweaking of data etc.

I'm quite sure folk smarter than me can fill in, but, honestly, the idea 
wasn't to try and design a solution on the fly here :)

Hence the desire to have a couple (seriously, it needs to be two or 
three to give some backup/redundancy whatever :) to just "Make it So" :)

As to the voting module - this seems like an ideal candidate for a grant 
for someone to write one for {$NEWCRMSYSTEM}  In the meantime, yes, the 
two could be run in parallel.

Cheers,
Hugh