Okay -- so @emi do @mike_hales @David Mynors @Josh Davis @Akshay and I are the team that will coordinate the joining of Meet.Coop and the set up of our Big Blue Button account. Seems like a good number and mix of people. Thanks for volunteering! Time/Date poll coming...

Status update: the Community Working Group Ops team is seeking to set up a working group to coordinate the process of joining Meet.Coop and providing the service to Social.Coop members. If you are interested in joining the circle, please reply here or DM me.

I think that is fine, though about half of the discussion will be about social.coop specifically.

In the agenda, I'm reading "participants in Loomio poll, plus open to others". Would it be possible for me to bring someone from Resonate Co-op who isn't a member of Social.coop? I can think of a few people who'd be interested in being at the meeing and getting a sense for what the process of joining Meet.coop could look like for Resonate. More as spectators than participants. I would want the meeting to stay focused on the relationship between Meet.coop and Social.coop, of course

Thank you, I'll be there!

please do join the call

I'm pretty new here, but I'd love to participate as well! I'm interested in the idea as a social co-op feature. I'm also a volunteer at Resonate Co-op -- Meet.coop comes up in discussion here and there because we will need solutions other than Jitsi once we grow a bit. This would give me some useful info to bring back to Resonate about what that process could look like.

A few thoughts:

@Jonathan Bean

> I see a deal where we pay and get credits

AFAIK the main expenses in running servers are not consumables like bandwidth, but staff time for setup and upkeep. So pay-per-use pricing isn't really necessary. Also, from a marketing POV, all-you-can-eat pricing is much simpler for prospective user/members to understand. As Clay Shirky pointed out back in 2000:

"... users want predictable and simple pricing ... In situations where there is real competition, providers are usually forced to drop 'pay as you go' schemes in response to user preference, because if they don't, anyone who can offer flat-rate pricing becomes the market leader."

Keep in mind we're competing with datafarms that charge $0 to most users.

@Matt Noyes

> Should we host a Jitsi instance? Or go in on hosting with others?

Given the above, it makes sense to work with another co-op who are already hosting conference servers. This allows social.coop to offer a robust service right away, while its techies can gain experience by helping out (ideally on production systems of a few of the conference software options). Down the track a bit, social.coop could decide to supply a conference service of it's own, and perhaps share it with whichever co-op service it partners with.

@Josef Davies-Coates

> if we do want to have a load of different apps with single sign-on I'd suggest we simply subscribe to Cloudron

There be dragons. Wouter would be able to confirm or correct, but I believe CommonsCloud started out using Cloudron but have since moved away from it. I've seen comments that suggest it isn't fully free code, which could be a reason.

Sorry Derek, I have been remiss. The next step is to review this thread and then make a proposal that addresses the various valid concerns and issues raised.

@Matt Noyes what's the next step here?

This is probably not just for BBB but we need a lot of testing and also invest in monitoring tools in order to make it a commercial success, I think. Otherwise, it won't scale

Big Blue Button performed well at Open 2020. 60+ participants and the server seemed to run fine. Providing social.coop members with an ethical tool for meetings and supporting other online cooperatives seems like a good investment of the resources, especially if this gets cheaper over time.

Thanks for point out OPEN 2020 @Matt Noyes - We'd love to see people from Social.coop there.

The Open Co-op has chosen to host OPEN 2020 via Meet.coop using Big Blue Button - it will be a really good test of the technology... ;)

We're dedicated to collaborating with everyone in the 'new economy' space and are very impressed by the collaboration behind meet.coop and will be supporting them as much as we can both financially and with promotion.

We believe there are a lot of lessons for meet.coop to learn from Social.coop and other distributed communities and co-ops... so one of our sessions at OPEN 2020 will focus on this https://open.coop/events/a-new-platform-co-op-for-collaborative-tools/ to try and determine the best way to govern this emerging platform co-op... We would love input from anyone here.

We have another session looking at use cases for collaborative tools https://open.coop/events/the-tools-of-collaboration/ which aims to determine a suitable selection of open source tools for different kinds of collaborative groups, which we could all, collectively own...

There's other sessions on mutual credit and the Murmurations protocol which aims to encourage coordination within networks of commons building initiatives.... plus much more so it should be a fruitful two days!

We made the unwaged ticket just £3.50 to try and make it as inclusive as possible - grab yours here, we'd love to see you ;)

Best

Oli

Thanks for the reminder!

Hi all -- please check out the OpenCoop 2020 sessions this week: https://open.coop/2020/04/02/open-2020-reinvented-networked-commons-initiatives/ Should be a helpful set of discussions for us.

Now that Matrix has been relaunched as Element, its look and feel is good. Pitched to be able to compete with eg Telegram. No longer a mysterious thing that only geeks and code freaks use.

Big fan of Matrix.

Mike and @Derek Caelin , IMHO Matrix seems to be the best liberating and federated replacement for Telegram. There are apps for all major OS (Riot is available on all of them in some form, but beware Electron).

Jabber with OMEMO is also an option. Conversations (Android) recently added voice/ video chat features, which I hear are compatible with some of the other Jabber clients, so there may be iOS and desktop options too.

I share your interest in moving off Telegram, but I think there is a desktop client for it.

I like the principles of Jami. But it feels a bit bleeding edge. I’m never sure what’s going to work, audio and video wise and I’m not sure finding people works well either. I’m not spending time currently on figuring out Jami, doesn’t feel ready, to me.

Am using Telegram mostly which I don’t want to but collaborators are there already. Would rather be using something that was laptop oriented not forever-scrolling smartphone. And where significant items can be held in’memory’.

Yes I have, i think it's excellent. But I doubt it has any sophistication like automatically assigning "hub" devices (aka servers) to scale up to a large number of participants without exponentially increasing traffic and computation

Have you tried Jami?

And also, I think there should be more investment into scalable peer-to-peer video conference software that can automatically optimize traffic (I am sure this is technically a tall order but hey - it would be an opportunity to employ brilliant computer scientists 😄)