Getting ready for moving national branches to the Rebels Manager

Hello everyone, thanks a lot for your support.

I'd like to let you know about how the Rebels Manager project progressed during December.

• We have reached out a bunch of Ruby on Rails developers and many of them shown interest in the project and in using their skills for good. A few started coding and we expect to see the number of contributions increase in the coming weeks. Yet we have to reach out to more developers, and we are discovering how complex it is to have regular contributors.
• National and local coordinators can now add events. An event can be an action, an outreach event, a talk or whatever. By the end of this week, all events will have a public page, and we will start working on registrations and custom forms.
• We talked with XR UK about the need to send meaningful campaigns to funders. We will add a layer for saving donations in a single place. XR UK is using different crowdfunding platforms and is interested in using the Rebels Manager to import data related to donations and then segment funders before sending them relevant campaigns.
• We talked with XR Italy, XR UK, XR Northern Ireland and XR Québec/Canada and this has been very interesting. We have learned that most of them use Action Network and want to leave it as soon as possible, which actually means as soon as the Rebels Manager offers enough features to leave Action Network. We are now working on events, and we will start working soon on emailing campaigns. We hope to come back to them by the end of Winter with a solution and an automated export feature.
• The XR International Support Team is currently gathering numbers about the national and local branches that benefited from funding. They started working on a software project and are interested in how we can automate this data collection.
• The XR Tech team is currently auditing the Rebels Manager before deploying it to all new national servers. We will get help very soon to finish this process, as the issue here is about having someone actually working on this specific task.

What can we conclude after these first months?

First, there is a real interest from everyone in having our own management software. Everyone agrees that it is currently missing and that relying on a US-based and centralized service provider is not an option anymore.

Secondly, finding regular contributors is not easy and I have to think about it. If we want things to progress as fast as we need to, the more time I can spend on the project, the better it is. And I should think about using the money we have to get external help for very specific tasks that are currently slowing us down.

We should have new stuff online by the end of January. See you in early February for the next update!