Co-operative Technologists Community

Sorry about the further delay on setting up the Discourse forum, we got stuck trying to configure postfix as the MTA and @katedawson has now got it working with Exim, so next we need to sort not configuring Exim via Ansible and then we will be good to go -- I'm very keen to have it up and running by the weekend so we can tell people about it at the Workers Co-op weekend CoTech session on Saturday morning :-)

The good news is that community.coops.tech is up and running but the bad news is that we still don't have incoming email working, but hopefully will tomorrow, or over the weekend. However outgoing email works so people can create accounts and post to the site via the web but it isn't functional in email list mode.

The email issue is being tracked here and @katedawson is helping with this, we have it working at ansible.webarchitects.org.uk/ but email on that server wasn't configured using Ansible -- I haven't managed to successfully reverse engineer the changes made on that server into Ansible Playbooks in git and then successfully deploy them on community.coops.tech but I'm sure we are very close to getting it working!

So feel free to sign up for accounts and start using it but please don't announce it to the world or encouraging everyone to join it just yet :-)

Just a quick update to apologise that incoming email still isn't working at community.coops.tech and I also want to try locking Docker down to be a little more secure so I'm about to delete the virtual server that the site is on and rebuild it from scratch so I'm sorry that the half dozen people who signed up for accounts might have to repeat that process tomorrow... We are very close to the site being ready to launch, it's just taking a while longer than anticipated...

It's all working \o/

I'll post a more sensible and comprehensive announcement tomorrow, the key thing is you can now create accounts and they won't get deleted (sorry to the 5 people who accounts before the server was rebuilt).

The community.coops.tech site is now LIVE and everybody here and those wanting to join in who are not here should head over there and sign up for accounts.

We are also going to need some input from everybody to kick start the community, there are lots of good suggestions for how to do this on the Discourse blog, which asks these questions?

• "What is your community’s purpose?" -- we have this post covering this at the moment
• "Where is the conversation?" -- we need to get a good number of threads going
• "Who’s here?" -- we should make some people moderators and introduce ourselves
• "How do we find it?" -- we need to link to the community site from everywhere, our emails, sites, Twitter etc etc

We need to start to only use Loomio for decisions, onwards and upwards! :-)

@chriscroome -- are you suggesting we have all the discussions over there, and come back here only for decisions? That is, live in the two spaces? Or would you think it was reasonable for a defined group that may be making decisions to continue living in Loomio, without the other place?

@asimong if the people organising the camp want to to all the communication / organising on Loomio rather than the Discourse site then that is fine by me, I'm not that fussed. But note that the Discourse site is open to all so anyone could sign up and contribute and that probably isn't going to be the case with Loomio, so that might have an influence, depending on how open you want the organising to be, on what forum you use.

Chris @chriscroome thanks for that v helpful answer.

Looks like the decision has effectively been made by others, to have the discussion in Discourse. I am still rather concerned about how it's going to come across having wider discussion in Discourse, and then a controlling subgroup going off to Loomio to make decisions. Doesn't appear to meet my need for transparency and openness. If we stick with transparency and openness, and use only Discourse, we will have deprived ourselves of a neat tool to make decisions.

This kind of community culture issue is important to me.