Trello, WhatsApp, Pretix, Instagram, Drive and email. The Erasmus Student Network in Potsdam runs about 80 events per semester across those six tools. All volunteers, no budget, and the team keeps changing.
That was our partner in the course Foundations of Enterprise Applications. There were five of us. The task: understand the process, find the weak spots, come up with a concept and build a prototype that a volunteer organisation without money can actually run.
We didn’t start with code. We started with conversations. Five interviews with people in very different roles, from the board to someone who only comes to the events as an Erasmus student, plus watching how things work day to day. I ran one of the interviews myself, in English. From that came a BPMN model of the current process with its own lane for each role, 27 tasks and 12 decision points. Then a list of 15 pain points and 10 strengths.
The most important pain point wasn’t technical. Every role only sees its own slice of the process, spread across the six tools. Nobody sees an event as a whole. And when someone leaves, their knowledge leaves with them.
So our concept was: one event, one shared view of the process. The event is the single source of truth, and every role gets its own view of it. Trello goes, WhatsApp, Pretix and Instagram stay because they work. Before that we ran a market analysis of what could be bought off the shelf.
The team shipped the prototype, and the demo on this page replays it with sample data. A board where an event moves from idea to planning, published, live and done. A public sign-up page without login: once capacity is full, you land on the waitlist. And an event log with the “Process Pulse”. It shows lead times and bottlenecks and checks whether a real event ran the way the target process says it should. Process mining, small size.