Having people fill out paper forms and then keeping them in a filing cabinet is dumb. It would be better if (a) all our membership information was in some sort of "data bank" and (b) people could sign up, or at least renew their accounts online.

Sign ups

The advantages of paper forms:

• They scale - if you have two keyboards, you can only sign up two people at once, etc.
• They're easy to read on O'Day
• You can sign them (though recent precedent around campus would suggest that click a button saying "I Accept" or checking a box are as good)
• It's harder to lose a bunch of forms than a single database

The advantages of online signups:

• People don't have to come to Uni, which is handy
• They don't need to be manually entered into a database, so committee doesn't have to do them

We could investigate forms that are easy to OMR:

See http://quexf.sourceforge.net/ and http://quexml.sourceforge.net/

Payment

Requiring cash or cheques sucks. PayPal is okay, but having to go through the Treasurer's bank account is a bit lame.

Database

We should store all user information in LDAP. Some people might say it should be in a SQL database, but those people are wrong.

• Write the schema (reusing inetOrgPerson stuff where possible)
• Write some ACLs
• Implement groups properly ([DAA] has a cunning plan)
• Write a frontend in Django using python-ldap-om

The only problem is what to do with people who are new members and don't have an account name yet.