Background

Hi all, I’m part of a small NGO which has a long history but small membership due to some unfortunate events in the past. The membership was almost in the thousands across the country it’s in, and now it’s only in the dozens. Other orgs siphoned off members, a split happened (which didn’t go anywhere) and there was a scandal that saw more people leave or resign.

This is all to say that the members of the NGO are a bit older and not very knowledgeable about technology. We use forms and take minutes during our meetings. We have in-person events, including educational, discussion, helping out other orgs, pamphleting, putting up posters, and use social media and to advertise.

Our membership is growing again but this time we are looking to be organized. Using stuff like a shared events calendar and a mailing list (right now it’s a bunch of emails in a word doc that are copy pasted in gmail). Logging our experiences during events and creating maps for our postering runs. Ideally we’d like to self-host what we can since some folks donated hardware.

The Ask

My question is what would be a good approach to creating a cohesive tech stack? Things are disjointed right now and I’ve been working on stuff on my own but I’m a bit lost and was looking for advice. I’ll write what I have done so far.

Specific Tools

Proxmox Server – to manage different machines as we add to it

MediaWiki – I set one up to have members add entries for their experiences during events for a repository of unstructured qualitative data, I used docker and cloudflare zero trust (adding emails to a whitelist and with a country whitelist) to limit who can access the wiki along with permissions for each user, not sure if this is good security practice, the mediawiki is in its own container in proxmox

OpenStreetMap – I haven’t set this up yet but I wanted to annotate the different routes people could take when putting up posters, I haven’t looked into if there’s a street view type feature where I could add a photo to each point to show how the posters should be placed

Radicale – This would be for having better access over a shared calendar

Prospective Tools?

Guides – We do stuff like brew beer in small batches to sell at some of our events, we spent a bunch of cash on printing logos on sticker paper to put on the bottles, we learned along the way how to do it cheaply and would like to ensure that knowledge stays with us next time around, I think this might work as a section in the mediawiki but idk

Closing Thoughts

There’s other stuff too like secure storage and maybe like an equivalent of wikimedia for our art/visual resources. Places to have our slideshows from our educational events and list of people to go to for different things (e.g. I and another person can make logos and simple art stuff). We also use whatsapp and signal atm and that seems to work but there is some interest in something like slack or teams for structured conversation.

If you haven’t noticed I don’t really know what I am doing and I’m a bit in over my head. I am having a ton of fun even though it’s frustrating. I get that planning everything out isn’t necessarily the best idea but it reduces my anxiety a ton to know there’s some kind of a roadmap.

Thanks in advance!!