this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2024
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Looking for a platform for a citizens' initiative / collection of signatures (feddit.de)
submitted 8 months ago by h3ndrik@feddit.de to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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There are lots of projects that enable groups to organize themselves, gather ideas and organize documents.

Does anyone know any Free Software solution that is somewhat tailored to the needs of an action group? It should be easy to use, enable and invite people to participate and provide some means of collecting signatures for the cause. Ideally it'd also provide a Wiki for later, a contact forum and some means to organize and collaborate on ideas, brainstorming and schedule meetings.

I'd also like to hear about other solutions, even if they target something broader and I'd have to customize them. Or miss some features but I can combine them with other software. Most importantly it has to be easy to use and inviting, so people would like to participate.

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[–] poVoq@slrpnk.net 3 points 8 months ago

What about: https://joinmobilizon.org/en/

[–] Ebby@lemmy.ssba.com 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Perhaps you're searching the wrong keywords. I think you may find more options for open source marketing. After all, what you want is an Ad campaign, just for political action.

I've created WordPress sites in the past and it can do most of your requests with a dozen plugins, but I consider it nagware and there are security concerns the more extras you add.

[–] h3ndrik@feddit.de 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Thank you. I've already worked through the awesome-selfhosted list and also did some googling with terms like "citizen", "initiative", "action group", "grassroots movement", "collaboration", "campaign", "petition"... And I found several projects for sharing food or organizing clubs or handling user-feedback, a few discontinued or very specialized solutions. But nothing that really suites this use-case. And if I put in "change.org" into alternativeto.net, it doesn't show any open source alternatives. ☹️

I'm pretty sure I can piece something together with a Wiki, and some software to handle form submissions and polls, customize that for signatures, maybe also a Nextcloud. And Fider.io looks nice. I could install all of that, link inbetween those and strap an SSO on top. But that's a proper amount of effort to get all of that customized and then also doing the SSO and coming up with an idea how to make the users like to sign up, choose a password etc...

At this point I'm still waiting for some easier / more integrated recommendations. But thanks for the idea with the marketing, I'll do some more research with that in mind.

[–] solrize@lemmy.world 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

See if civicspace still exists. I think it was renamed but stayed around at least for a while.

[–] h3ndrik@feddit.de 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Do you mean https://civicspacelabs.org ? That seems to not be actively developed for a long time alreadt. And sadly I also couldn't find any successor. It's been a Drupal plugin, right? Drupal also lists "Open Social" but I'm not sure about that. Doesn't properly match my needs and their website smells like open-core software and they'd rather sell me something...

[–] solrize@lemmy.world 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Yeah that was probably it. Oh well. I had heard of it but wasn't familiar beyond remembering that it used Drupal.

Still, in the old days, your app could have been a simple CGI script. A little known "secret" is that you can still do that.

[–] h3ndrik@feddit.de 1 points 8 months ago

Thanks. I'll delve down a bit more into the world of Drupal and Wordpress plugins. Maybe I can piece something together with that. It's just very annoying to always navigate around all these paid plugins that come with a barely usable open variant...

Hehe. I think my needs are a bit more complicated than that. I could probably put together a Perl script for CGI to collect some signatures 😆 But I'm still missing 85% of the total things I need. I'm glad we have easy deployment methods nowadays. I mean I've started like that. Fighting with CGI and badly organized PHP scripts. And they've all gotten a headache to maintain at some point. But nowadays I can set up an environment with python, flask and a database in about the same time. It's just that that web development isn't fun (to me) anymore. You always need 3 frameworks to do a single task, learn how to use them and maintain the requirements, and spend quite some time implementing javascript popups if an input got accepted, do mandatory email double-opt-in techniques and do lots of theming and responsive design stuff... I'm sorry, I got a bit off track here. But I'd really like to avoid this.

[–] poVoq@slrpnk.net 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Early days, but maybe: https://github.com/activist-org/activist

[–] h3ndrik@feddit.de 1 points 8 months ago

Thanks, nice find! I'll spin up a Docker container tomorrow and see if it's already close to a usable state.