Hi @amunizp,
I completely agree - at Leigh Hackspace we have a range of user (both member and ‘administrator’) needs around this area, but we haven’t been able to find a suitable ‘off-the-shelf’ product that we could implement. We have a lot of software - probably too much - but we are still lacking that ‘central hub’ or glue layer that would connect them all together.
We use:
- Wordpress for website
- Discourse for public-facing discussion/bloggery, and as a place for private discussion that’s more persistent than a free Slack account with its 10K message limit.
- Slack for real-time discussion, chat, and kitten GIFs
- GoCardless for membership payments
- Eventbrite for event ticketing and payment
- We have a ‘home-rolled’ RFID entry register, but it’s flaky and it isn’t yet trusted to operate the door locks
- The usual gamut of social media accounts( tw fb ig ), but these can be connected using Zapier/IFTTT and are OK
- MailChimp for mailing lists and advertising
- Trello for jobs/todos
The sorts of things that would be nice if they could work:
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When a new member signs up via [payment gateway] (GoCardless in our case) they are automatically added to our Slack team and given ‘member’ group access on Discourse. (Conversely, when a member cancels via [payment gateway] they are removed form Slack and given ‘non-member’ access rights on Discourse again)
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We want to be able to see who is in the space at any given time (from RFID entry) so we can track usage, peak times, for fire safety, and security. (Admins should be able to view this info remotely). It would be nice if the fact of the space being open and having [greater than x number of people in it] could trigger a post on social media - ‘come join us we’re open’, kind of thing.
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We could do with a place to handle management of membership ‘certifications’ ie Big Scary Machine certification, who is deemed appropriate to use and teach what tools.
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Space access credential management (ie RFID codes for door locks etc) - and possibly slightly more simply for the space like our that use physical keys, management of ‘who has got which key set’.
I know some Hackerspaces (NottingHack) have built their own Hackspace Management System (HMS), we did look into whether we could extend or build on NottingHack’s HMS but we didn’t get far. Maybe as a larger UK Hackerspaces community, this would be a really important collaboration, to build a flexible, extensible, Hackspace management system.
I’ve noticed a lot of Hackspaces (though not all) are using Discourse as an in-house forum, and I have some Ruby/Rails skills, so I was considering building some of these features I’ve mentioned above as a Discourse ‘Hackerspace-Admin’ plugin, since this would reduce the need for another system, and might simplify the integrations. Thoughts on this anyone?
Are there any other HS organisers out there with these needs (and others), who want to collaborate and make something that everyone can use?
And is there anything out there internationally we could get involved in?
Marcus