You might have seen some of my previous posts and, once again, I’m looking for some opinions… I know there’s loads of those here! If you build sites/apps/platforms/anything digital for coops, cics, societies etc. - this one is for you.
The question today is: If an existing, co-op focused, production-ready auth system was available to use for your next project, what dealbreakers would stop you from using it?
Any/all opinions welcome - hit me with your inner skeptic!
Oauth compatibility - great point! Yes, let’s assume it is.
As for co-op focused, let’s imagine that it integrates with some other features/services that coops might commonly use… Maybe there is something there that you would love to see (I’m all ears if there is)? Or perhaps it’s just run by another coop which your organisation could become a member of.
Yes ideology isn’t what I’m after here, although it might inform some of the choices! Do you have anything else to add about authentication services r.e. convenience and practicality?
For me this is phrased a bit back to front and feels like a solution in search of a problem. Auth is something trivially easy to implement or just included as stock in most frameworks (rails/django/drupal/wordpress etc). It’s not an area im looking to innnovate in or change, and its something that if it goes wrong is usually pretty disasterous.
So why would I want to outsource auth at all? Usually the reason for that is that I want to make members of the org I’m working on need one less login (and associated organisational admin to manage that login) so I want single sign on with existing organisational IDs which are invariably GSuite or Outlook. So that means I’d think about looking at something rock solid that’s been around for ages like Auth0, or finding a single sign on gem/npm package to implement.
If there was an existing service widely used by the coop movement (i.e. as wide as Gmail, Outlook or Salesforce), maybe that company could look at offering single sign on. But there is no way in hell I’d trust something so high importance and easy to do myself to a new third party service personally on the sole basis it was a coop.
Hope this isnt too negative and do appreciate the invitation to think about what collective services we might need tho
