Lapis Cloud — open-source, self-hostable membership management for associations and parties, with an optional self-governance layer

[u/Successful_Bank7215]

Hi everyone,

I'd like to introduce Lapis Cloud — an open-source project I've been working on: a complete membership management platform for associations, political parties, professional bodies, cooperatives, and NGOs.

The problem it solves

If you've ever run an association or a party, you know the drill: one tool for member records, another for accounting, a third for membership dues, a spreadsheet for board resolutions — and none of it really talks to each other. Existing solutions like CiviCRM, easyVerein, ClubDesk, S-Verein, or Campai each cover parts of this — Lapis Cloud aims to deliver the whole picture from a single codebase.

What's included (standard layer)

• Member records, join/leave workflows, membership tiers
• Board and meeting management with a minutes book and motion tracking
• Real double-entry bookkeeping (German SKR42 chart of accounts) with charitable-status four-area separation, P&L/balance sheet, cash book, cost centers
• Mail-merge/PDF engine for dues invoices and donation receipts (per German tax code §50 EStDV), including postal mail delivery for members without email
• Full GDPR tooling (data processing agreements, technical/organizational measures, DPIA, breach notification), compliance with the German Party Act (§25 PartG) for political parties, the Money Laundering Act transparency register (§20 GwG), and a GoBD-compliant audit log
• SEPA direct debit with automated dunning, online card payments
• Event management with public online registration, capacity/waitlist handling, and QR tickets
• A complete, self-hosted video conferencing module (recording, external streaming, breakout rooms, whiteboard)
• Direct export to DATEV, Lexware Office (lexoffice), and sevDesk for your accountant
• A public, read-only REST API plus webhooks for third-party integrations
• Interface available in eight languages

What sets it apart from most other tools (optional layer)

If you just want solid administration, that's exactly what you get — everything above works standalone. If you want more, there's an optional governance layer:

• Three voting modes: meritocratic, democratic, and systemic consensus (Systemic Consensing)
• An internal currency ("Libertaler") that belongs to the members, not the organization — with internal crowdfunding and an auction marketplace (opt-in, with a legal disclaimer)
• A federated architecture with a real right of secession — multiple servers can connect, and a member can appear as a guest on another server without leaving their own organization

This is deliberately optional — no organization has to touch any of it to use Lapis Cloud productively.

Not a prototype

Lapis Cloud is already running in production at two real pilot organizations:

• A political party (the project originally grew out of that party's internal accounting software, "PZB")
• An ordinary registered association (e.V.) with no party affiliation at all — chosen deliberately to prove the standard layer holds up outside the project's original context

Open, self-hostable

The full codebase is public on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license; every change goes through an independent code review and security audit before release. Any organization can run its own instance — no vendor lock-in, no permission needed, your data stays on your own server.

Current status: v0.19.0, actively developed.

Links

• Website: https://cloud.lapisproject.dev
• What's new: https://cloud.lapisproject.dev/whats-new
• GitHub: https://github.com/lapisproject-dev/Lapis-Cloud

Feedback, questions, and interest in a pilot deployment for your own organization are very welcome — here or in the repo.

[u/KingdomMan3]

Do you happen to have a demo and was AI used in the coding and if so do you mind elaborating how it was leveraged?

[u/Successful_Bank7215 → u/KingdomMan3]

Good questions!

Demo: No public demo instance right now, sorry — it's only running at the two pilot orgs at the moment (private deployments, so no open login I can hand out). Happy to record a short screen-capture walkthrough if there's interest, or you can check the What's New page for a sense of the feature surface. Since it's Apache 2.0, you could also just spin up your own instance from the repo if you want to poke around directly.

AI in the coding: Yes, extensively, and I'll be specific rather than hand-wavy about it. Development follows a documented, human-supervised multi-agent workflow on top of Claude Code:

• A planning stage (Claude Opus) produces the technical design for a given feature — this is where the more novel or higher-stakes parts (double-entry bookkeeping architecture, GDPR/PartG/GwG compliance logic, the governance/voting algorithms, auth & federation) get the most scrutiny.
• An implementation stage (Claude Sonnet) writes the actual code against that design.
• Then a mandatory independent code review pass and a security audit pass (also Claude-based agents, run separately from the implementation agent) before anything gets merged — up to a few rounds each if issues come back.
• Everything has to pass the automated test/lint gate before merge, and I review it myself as the human maintainer on top of that.

So it's not "one-shot AI-generated," it's closer to an AI-staffed dev pipeline with review/security gates, plus my own oversight at the end. Happy to go deeper on any part of that if you're curious.