Hiya, coming from Bristol Hackspace I’ve had a bit of a view into what each of the two hackspace does well. Manchester has a really good induction booking system and the accounts area is also great.
Compared to Bristol who have only just moved away from Google Groups and inductions are requested by constant posts clogging up the forums asking if anyone wants to run an induction.
Is the Manchester system an open source or custom built thing? Would there be any scope for it being open source, or would it be quite confusing to anyone but the creator?
However! Early on, apparently some secrets were accidentally committed to the repo, and in rewriting history, something must have happened which broke the upstream connection, so now it’s a private repo living at github.com/hacmanchester/membership-system
This isn’t ideal - but as I don’t know specifically what happened so I can’t say if we are good to make the repo public - I recently rotated a load of API keys so it should be safe to do so.
I tried a few times to pull in upstream changes to rehestablish the remote, but we had merge hell with thousands of conflicts, some quite complex. Someone else tried too which was great but it was the same issue - too many conflicts to reasonably sort out.
Since then I’ve taken it under my wing a bit - adding and improving various bits over time pretty much across the whole system.
We have a few people interested in helping with development but I need to ask again to get people added to the repo - would you like access too? I think the more people using and importantly documenting the system the better - it’s good and it works but it’s a bit of an enigma at first.
I’m happy to help if you’d like to get it up and running for your space - it’s based on a fairly old version of Laravel and takes some time setting up and getting a schema sorted in the database but it could be a good exercise in properly documenting it, as there was no documentation available when it was set up here.
If you want to get going maybe clone the Build Brighton one and see how you get on, or just have a look round to see how it works and if it’s suitable for yourselves.
We have a working group for our copy of the membership system on Telegram so we could add you there and work on getting access to everyone who wants it, and getting you guys set up
Amazing thank you for the detailed response! I should clarify, I’ve moved to Manchester now, so just pass ideas back to Bristol since I used to be fairly heavily involved there for a short while.
I’m not actually very coding/computer savvy myself sadly, so getting me involved would be fairly useless (currently). But if your offers still there, I’ll let the Bristol space see your response and let them know they could get in touch if they had questions. They might decide it doesn’t work for them anyway, who knows…
