Single Sign On for Furries
Published Today
If I were to bootstrap a furry convention today for its first year, without writing any code, I'd probably start with a square store to handle both online and in person transactions, a custom domain, a social media account, and an email address for any business communications. Check in for pre-registrations will be clunky, but for a 100-300 attendance event, it should be feasible.
Disclosure: I have no personal experience with Square. I know people that work there and it works well enough for physical goods and digital services for furries.
There's more, like a bank account, but in scope of the staff that make the event happen, only a few services are needed before and during the event: the store, social media, and email. Three shared credentials (not good, not great) among five to ten people will go a long way for the first year.
Future years will be different. Once a convention needs staff to specialize in responsibilities to pull the event off, this bootstrap model won't scale. Attendees want to run their own meetups or panels on the schedule, like talking about trains and public transportation. Managing this by email would be possible, but a hassle. Where will it go? A spreadsheet? You'll need Google Suite to collaborate, or at worst it's on someone's personal machine to be printed on papers on-site.
Shadow-IT will be the norm while the convention's technology team is under-developed or under-powered. The art team might use Trello while operations uses a spreadsheet on a personal google account, which is shared from personal account to personal account. Personally-Identifying-Information (PII) may be collected and forgotten for years in staffs and ex-staff's google drives for years because of this. Working and collaborating will get increasingly messy and frustrating as access, visibility, and appropriate preservation and destruction are not tied to the organization.
And so, as the convention gets more serious and capable in running the event, the breadth of services and systems grow. The same could be said for any small business too.
By the point the total staff headcount exceeds a hundred people, something has to change. Most staff can only handle one credential. Even though password managers and passkeys are now more accessible and integrated, enough don't use them to make it a risk to add more credentials.
We need single sign on to scale headcount, to improve visibility, to improve access and to improve security.
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