Seltzer CRM

Seltzer CRM is a free/open-source tool facilitating self-organization in member-run cooperative organizations like hackerspaces. It currently supports contact information, membership accounts and payments, as well as historical reporting. Open-source contributors have developed a number of modules including mentorship, storage tracking, and RFID entry.

As a co-founder and board member of the i3 Detroit hackerspace, I found there was a need for simple, modular tools that could be learned quickly by volunteers and regular members rather than dedicated staff. I started working on Seltzer to meet this need. Since 2009, I have worked with Matt Oehrlein, Chris Murray, and other volunteers to maintain Seltzer. During active development, I held weekly online development meetings to coordinate the open-source developers. Since then, Seltzer has been adopted by several spaces around the world and helpled i3 Detroit grow to over 150 members while maintaining its volunteer-based, self-organized structure. The core project has been maintenance-only since 2015.

Seltzer's code is modeled after Drupal and uses a very similar module and theme system. The main difference is that Seltzer is fundamentally organized around contacts, rather than Drupal's content nodes. This modular structure has allowed spaces using the software both to contribute back to the core code and to develop functionality specifically to their needs.it'