membernator -- validate membership cards

2019-06-20 - Louis-Philippe Véronneau

I currently work part-time for student unions in Montreal and they often have large general assemblies (more than 2000 people). As you can likely figure out by yourself, running through paper lists to validate people's identity is a real PITA and takes quite a long time.

For example, even if you have 4 people checking names, if validating someone's identity takes 5 seconds on average (that's pretty fast), it takes around 40 minutes to go through 2000 people.

Introducing membernator, a python program written using pygame that validates membership cards against a CSV database! The idea is to use barcode scanners to scan people's school ID cards and see if they are in our digital lists. Hopefull, it will make our GA process easier for everyone.

I want to thank Jonathan Carter who provided the inspiration (and a codebase) for this project. membernator is a heavily-modified fork of ToeTally, a program currently in developpement for the DebConf Video Team.

membernator will eventually be packaged in Debian (I've started packaging stuff!), but for now you can either install it manually or get it from PyPi.

Here's a quick video of what running membernator looks like. I'm typing the IDs by hand since I left my barcode scanner at work. Excuse the weird screen glitches, it seems I'm somewhat bad a screen recording.


codemembernator