Exploring next dev project; connections to fundraising and website

Thanks for the meeting today @SueJ

@richjensen on ‘bottleneck’ question and funding and dev priorities, here is an opinion, but it is for @jackhajb and his team to decide this, not me.

  1. Need a full time paid developer alongside @auggod to get to understand all the core stuff. Improve all docs / baseline stuff and issues list as part of the job. Support @jackhajb in mobilising volunteers and planning epics, picking up where we left off before xmas. Ensure we have tech support, security and infrastructure management covered as well.

  2. Consider the use of the existing platform components to get the fundraising message out. There is some messiness / risk in that. See the attached sketch which might help picture it. Sorry if it’s complex. 3 pics: where we are now, where we had hoped to be with relaunch and finally… an interim step that might not be too distracting, if we can find alternative resources to those engaged on 1 above.

Resonate-short-term-funding-tech-option.pdf (973.0 KB)

  • where we are now: still using wordpress and stripe plugin for all significant money transactions other than credit top ups. No consistent messaging about funding urgency or targets. Little-used open collective account.
  • where we want to be: everything centred on a core signup and profile service (APIs+apps) with capable payment and accounting services behind it. Most of the static ‘big’ messaging including funding to be done on our HUGO site. No more wordpress. No need for Open Collective. Secure and consistent user and role management.
  • interim: possibilities… with drawbacks!
    – put some of the key new messages done for the HUGO site live - emphasise FUND US messaging
    – remove redundant old content from the wordpress site - leave the WP profiles and forms - add / emphasise FUND US messages
    – add clearer fundraising banners on forum with links to forms
    – put the open collective page in action (with links)

Drawbacks / issues: - It’s messy!

  • how to keep the messaging consistent - one content pipeline, many targets?
  • how to keep track of the mess of cross links this will create?
  • will there be domain coexistence issues and deployment issues?

Some small parts of that ‘interim’ might be done at lower risk of course.

Please refer this to the devs and @jackhajb for discussion… it’s their call.

5 Likes

Great summary, @Nick_M – the paper sketches are very helpful too.

@executive @workers I believe that the top priority dev project is to move our onboarding, account management, membership management, and payments processing to the new ID server + stripe setup. @auggod has stated the same. Much of this work is nearly done from our last development projects and the benefits are many, tying into many of the objectives discussed during the #roadmap-sessions.

“Professionalize” the platform:

Increase income:

  • All the above will lead to better user experience, and thus more listening and music submitted
  • We can bill Listener Members for the new 10 EUR membership fee
  • Purchasing supporter shares, buying credits, and managing membership are all on one page, leading to more purchases of these products

Increase user base:

  • Ease in joining, purchasing credits, participating in forum, clearly knowing membership status, and minimizing login issues will increase user base

Democratize the co-operative:

  • With stripe managing membership status, we can explore integrating membership status into forum usergroups and categories, improving members ability to create and vote on #new-proposals
  • With stripe managing membership status, we can easily have general meetings and manage voting in forum

Facilitate volunteer cooperation / improve work conditions:

  • Lots of administration and membership-management busywork will be automated
  • Accounting/finance work will be minimized due to records being integrated in one place

When to start?

My understanding is that this work could start as soon as we organize/pay a crew to do it. However, if the new HUGO website does not launch at the same time, it will take some extra work by that same crew to figure out how to keep our existing Wordpress site and make sure everything fits together. Since our follow-up project would likely be to finalize the HUGO website, much of this finagling would be redundant.

What about the new website?

Revising the new HUGO website to follow @zetto.plus’ recent suggestions could happen simultaneously if a HUGO designer joined the project crew and had very clear direction of what the changes should be. As it stands, we need to refine this proposal before work could begin.

What about the fundraising page?

@zetto.plus has offered great suggestions for a Page on new website for donations, projects, volunteering. I’ve split that post into #new-proposals. Once again, we’d need a dev to estimate how much work this would take. If it is a lot of work, we should do the upcoming fundraising project on Open Collective as planned and scope this out for a future development project.

4 Likes

Even as top priority, given the complexity and sensitivity, this transition is likely to extend for months, per @Nick_M’s comment at @Finance earlier today.

I think it is helpful to be loud and clear that we are resetting the timeline for delivery from estimates in early Dec.

The new timeline will also inform what may be viable ‘work arounds’ to meet the urgent sales, fund-raising and messaging objectives we have during this period of transition between services.

Isn’t work and testing underway/continuing on the Onboarding and Accounting Epic?
Per this review from Dec 3? Flow Design for Creating Profiles and Joining as a Member - #7 by Nick_M

Appreciate the work shared here.

2 Likes