As a contributor, I would like to be able to make donations to OTC via the website without relying on Give.MN

[wbushey]

Open Twin Cities currently relies on GiveMN.org to accept online donations. During yesterday's Give to the Max Day, that site experienced significant technical problems that prevented people from being able to contribute to Open Twin Cities. This has happened in the past (IIRC, the last three or four Give to the Max Days have seen significant technical problems).

We should build a contribution page on opentwincities.org. The advantages to doing this would be:

• Multiple methods for contributors to make contributions - we could continue to have our page on GiveMN, which would provide us with redundancy in the event of a problem
• Far more control over content and branding on the contributions page

Using off the shelf libraries and services, it is possible to build a simple donation form on opentwincities.org, similar to https://marnitastable.org/contribute/ .

[wbushey]

A couple of facts about the current www.opentwincities.org:

• The site is hosted on GitHub Pages - a statically generated (via Jekyll) website hosted for free by GitHub
• We use NameCheap.com for DNS
• We do not currently have an SSL cert

For SSL on GitHub Pages, the only option I have seen so far is to use the Universal SSL and nameservers of CloudFlare. CloudFlare has a free plan that provides this, and we could continue to have the opentwincities.org domain registered with NameCheap while using CloudFlare's nameservers.

On initial research, I'm not sure that we can implement a contribution page on www.opentwincities.org as is. All of the on-site payment options I have come across so far require some server-side processing, which makes sense for security, and which is something that GitHub Pages does not provide. There are some servers built for simple Stripe processing (https://github.com/christophercliff/flatmarket, not entirely sure what this is doing), and we could use AWS or Heroku to host something.

Finally, Stripe's documentation on submitting payment information is pretty clear.

[eebbesen]

• review previous (old) comments from 2016
• look for donation links for our brigade via Code for America

[andy5995]

https://opencollective.com/ I think is a good portal for accepting donations.