Working Group Minutes/MWG 2021-11-06

From OpenStreetMap Foundation

The Membership Working Group met on 2021-11-06 at 1800 UTC via Big Blue Button.

Participants

  • Michael Spreng (datendelphin)
  • Steve Friedl (SJFriedl)
  • Thomas Barris (Thomas)

Automation of Active Contributor Membership

Currently, processing of Active Contributor Memberships is done manually by MWG, verifying the OSM username and active mapping days, and this takes a substantial amount of time.

MWG engaged a CiviCRM consultant (Noah), who has created an integration that allows for automating the process by verifying the OSM username (via OAuth) and the proper number of mapping days, and creating the membership fully automatically.

We discussed how to best roll this out.

MWG will roll it out softly for new members while we shake out the integration, then publicize more widely.

To help test this, Steve will ping Arnalie (very active member in the Philippines) to see if she can find a few folks who qualify to sign up as a new member to help shake it out before we widen the scope.

Thomas suggested that automation for ACP renewals not be implemented until after the election in December, because renewed members may be able to participate in the election, it would be best to avoid creating actual or perceived problems with voting eligibility. All concurred (no formal vote was taken).

Thomas also expressed concern about the renewal peak workloads due to the large number of renewals coming due at the same time every year around the anniversary of the initial Fee Waiver program. Upon discussion, we think the automation will alleviate most of this.

The new form is not linked on the main "join" pages while it's being tested:

https://join.osmfoundation.org/civicrm/contribute/transact/?reset=1&id=14

It still needs a bit of wordsmithing.

It was discussed that the new form could allow creation of duplicate memberships attached to the same person, such as if a Normal member renews as Active Contributor, but we think a database query could identify this and allow MWG to sort it out.

We expect this will not be common, but will almost always be inadvertent, so MWG will contact the member in question to find out which membership they want.

If this ends up being more than just a few, we'll ask Noah if this can be addressed in software to reduce manual work.

Though the Active Contributor Program allows Normal members, the current forms only supports Associate members. Fully supporting Normal Members is on the roadmap but with no ETA.

Renewal Reminders

Again there are reports that Renewal Reminders are not going out properly (Steve relayed a report of this from Arnalie).

It appears that the flag/counter indicating a sent reminder is not reset when the member actually renews, so the following year any previously-sent reminders are not sent. This has been a chronic problem for years, and MWG will engage consultant Noah to sort this out once and for all.

The meeting concluded at 19:02 UTC. SJFriedl recorded the minutes.

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