Autonomous Infrastructure

While I understand the point, I think it could be argued that (a different sort of) autonomy and independence comes from NOT having to maintain your own infrastructure and applications.

Because I care very little about the general privacy issues that seem to be driving this conversation, I for one would prefer us to take the route with minimal effort involved, so we can focus our efforts instead on things that (IMO) really matter. But I understand that others will feel differently :)

I worry this is purity for purity's sake, and that actually we could get more done if we allow ourselves to get a little dirty.

It's not just about autonomy/privacy. It's crucially about value chain. An important route for growth for some (not all) digital businesses is to capture more of the value chain. That's the thinking behind the DX model. We do not have to be confined to the top (application) layer of the stack. We don't have to be just consumers of bandwidth and hosting, we can play a role in providing them and co-operativise (sorry) more of the layers.

Coops too often are confined to selling other people's stuff (or selling their labour to work on other people's stuff). (Eg The Phone Coop just resells access to other people's networks.)

Yes, definitely get that. Sorry, I thought we were talking about hosting the tools we use just for ourselves... ?

I'd like to express appreciation for this conversation, on both sides. Yes, other things being equal, great to be autonomous and independent on the software as well as other fronts. But with @brianspurling we know that often things are not equal, and that self hosting (a bit like food self-sufficiency back in the 1970s) can drain all one's time rather pointlessly.

I wonder if a great aim -- I think hinted at by some of the contributions -- would be to grow whole ICT systems that are cooperative in execution as well as in spirit. If we want to supplant -- or at least provide an alternative to -- the major capital-driven businesses, we will need to be very efficient ourselves, and use as many economies of scale, and economies of scope as we can.

We have to tackle, as we are addressing elsewhere, business models for all cooperating players. Where software is open source and self-hosted, how are the creators recompensed? Various possible answers, but I guess that should be on a different thread. Or is it, already?

While I have a limited understanding of what self-hosting would take at a technical level, I do find this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=112d45b03hM (and apologies in advance to the more politically sophisticated among us... ) - as good a reason as any for why, in a cooperative context, it's a 'good thing'

Dmytri Kleiner has a principled position, which is fine in itself. A bit like Richard Stallman ;) My (possibly naive) understanding is that Dmytri would advocate building systems where there are no intermediate servers, meaning that information is not stored anywhere between the people communicating, and so in principle the information communicated cannot be exploited in any way. Which is a noble aim.

Personally, I see it as quite acceptable for people to share at least some of their communication systems with other people. If you use a number of devices, it can be hard (though perhaps not impossible) to keep them "in sync" without the help of a server in between. If those servers are run by a worker coop -- as in platform coops -- and directly answerable to each user rather like a member coop, what's not to like? Perhaps, mainly, as I was saying above, what can be improved are the economies of scale and scope.

Following @dougbelshaw if it's too hard to do, or simply uneconomic, people will use the commercial tools so as not to disadvantage their own work. So the challenge, as I see it, of autonomous infrastructure is just to get it working in a way that has minimal costs both in terms of money and time for users. It needs to be as easy to learn and use as commercial alternatives. That's where some current open source software has a weak spot.

Can't say more than ditto to all of the above.... and that I'm a sucker for principle :)

I am in favour of autonomous infrastructure as an ultimate goal. I agree fully with the ideas expressed by the likes of Dmytri Kleiner as to the overall structure of the internet. I talked to @chriscroome a little about leveraging, say, OpenStack to provide a cloud offering hosting on hardware owned by cooperatives.

However, I feel it should be a strategic goal not a tactical priority. Its the kind of thing you chip away and have to plan with clarity if you want to get anything done without it hampering other more immediate goals like simple operational effectiveness.

I'd want to move this discuss therefore to more pragmatic territory. Is there one type of thing that CoTech could do, and do well, to provide autonomous infrastructure for cooperatives? This one thing should be then done and if found to be worthwhile expanded into other areas. It could be, for example, email, or chat or file sharing. It would have to do this roughly as well as the big players in this space and there are some clones which are decent. Then, with this success under the belt, we can begin to talk about transitioning another system. This is how you would plan an IT project and I see no reason why this shouldn't be done here.

A working system operating at scale is a far more important thing than to merely ask if such a thing is desirable or plausible.

I'd want to move this discuss therefore to more pragmatic territory. Is there one type of thing that CoTech could do, and do well, to provide autonomous infrastructure for cooperatives?

Yes, I think we should have a shared instance of Sandstorm

A working system operating at scale is a far more important thing than to merely ask if such a thing is desirable or plausible.

+1,000,000. I'd be fine with just starting with Etherpad, as there's not even a commercial offering that does such a good job for getting stuff done in a decentralised, realtime way.

... to add to @shaunfensom points:

An 'owned' infrastructure would/could be a distinct + vis a vis PR to both potential members/collaborators and clients.