Loomio
Thu 2 Apr 2020 3:34AM

Should we be providing collaboration tools for Coronaworld?

NS Nathan Schneider Public Seen by 41

There has been lots of discussion lately about open alternatives to Zoom, Slack, etc. And we've been talking about expanding Social.coop's offerings. Is now the time? What would be most useful? Seems like there's a great deal of demand lately for decent Jitsi instances, though that might be especially demanding. Thoughts?

MN

Matt Noyes Thu 2 Apr 2020 4:35AM

There has been a lot of discussion ( @mike_hales has summarized a lot of it here). There are also several initiatives, notably Disroot's Covid19Kit. (Also Collective.Tools) Given Jitsi's still patchy performance (in my experience), a few of us are experimenting with Jami, which is p2p. There is also some experimenting (maybe more than that) on Secure Scuttlebutt. (I am looking forward to the debut of Mobilizon - the Framasoft alternative to FB Groups, now in beta.)

Then there is the DisCO/Guerilla Translation idea that your "Toolbox is the Browser" which I have been playing with. The key concept being that what matters is that a collective chooses and organizes tools according to the way they facilitate their work and organizing goals.

For me, a Social.Coop "Dashboard" with a curated set of floss (federated?) tools, and some p2p, is appealing, even if we do not end up hosting instances. Maybe we could partner with an existing project? We could also consider choosing projects to support financially.

In practice, our dashboard already includes Loomio, Git.coop, Matrix, Mastodon, and OpenCollective. In the CWG Ops Team we often use Etherpad (hosted on Disroot) and Google Calendar, and Zoom.

M

mike_hales Thu 2 Apr 2020 11:52AM

@Matt Noyes referred to a summary of a discussion - Platform tools and making the living economy. The summary is available here in a wiki. Use this version, the Etherpad is subject to corruption.

MN

Matt Noyes Thu 2 Apr 2020 3:24PM

My description wasn't fair -- Mike's document is a thoughtfully organized and clarified framing of several important questions.

DS

Danyl Strype Thu 2 Apr 2020 6:11AM

@ntnsndr

decent Jitsi instances

From what I've heard, this is a contradiction-in-terms 😏 Jitsi Meet is a massive resource on the client-side, and from what I've heard the same is true on the server-side. The NZOSS is hosting Big Blue Button with the Greenlight front-end, which seems like a better choice. Dave Lane, who set that up, is also the Open Source Technologist for the Open Educational Resources Foundation.