Developing a Progressive Web Application for Membership Management : Exploring how a PWA can reduce administrative workload in small-scale non-profit organizations

This report presents the problem a small non-profitable organization faces with a large administrative workload for a small number of individuals. For Uppsala Makerspace (UM) this includes membership handling and manually accepting new memberships and their payments. Further they are also using a different system for unlocking doors which adds to the workload. Since Sweden has a lot of small non-profitable organizations, a lot of them are facing the same problem as UM. To help UM with this, a Progressive Web App (PWA) was developed. A PWA integrates the best from native apps while retaining the flexibility of regular websites. It is also a cheaper alternative to native apps, which makes it of special interest for non-profitable organizations, which often lack resources for expensive solutions. The work was carried out in different segments. First specific information was gathered about the makerspace and from there a design was developed. After that the development started. Construction of the PWA included collecting and adding data to an NoSQL database as well as doing front end work according to the developed design and input from the members. A few complications arose along the way. The most major one was how the payment should be handled. After careful consideration Swish was chosen as the main payment provider because it aligned well with our clients needs and resources. Overall the final product met the most crucial aspects that were expected from the PWA. Since the project was big, some things were left for future work. This includes for example adding another payment provider for those who can not use swish, such as foreign people without a swedish social security number.