chat

This is essentially what I'm saying. It is easier to build, easier to support and grow, and thus more practical for us to make something which does one thing very well, rather than a tool which does everything you could ever want to do in a community.

I am excited to integrate with FLOSS tools, but as a co-owner and co-op member it's my primary responsibility at the moment to allow Loomio to pay its members a sustainable wage so that we can continue to provide this useful thing to you without killing ourselves. We have already lost tons of talented people as members because we've been unable to build a sustainable business out of this thing yet. I'm not going to work on anything which I don't think will move us in that direction.

That said, Loomio is open source. If someone feels strongly about this, they can design and resource it, and make it happen.

This is waaaaay off-topic but...

"It was a shame to see Sandstorm go the way of the 'community supported project'"

Having read the Sandstorm project blog post about this, I totally disagree. Sandstorm have abandoned their "open core" business model, taken down their paywall, and liberated all their code. I think this is a great thing for the project, and for the world.

Sandstorm realised that they couldn't build a commons-based business by selling stuff to "enterprise" (corporations). Even Enspiral are sometimes willing to use proprietary freeware (GITHub, Slack, Google Docs, Trello) rather than self-hosting libre replacements, despite the clash of values involved. Why would profit-centred companies spend money on a (partially) free code service when they can outsourcing their computing to The Stacks, and get a proprietary service gratis? The "open core" business model is the worst of both worlds, and it's not the future of funding free code development.

Sandstorm would be better off looking at paying for dev costs by collecting regular, small contributions for sysadmins running their software, and the end users. There are now a number of libre platforms for managing this, including Gratipay, LiberaPay, OpenCollective, and Salt (a BountrySource service).

Let's find a place where it is on topic. I'd like to learn how the Sandstorm project is doing since the founders abandoned their business plan.

Likewise the small-contribution plans: who's making a living from them?

I've opened a thread for a discussion about Sandstorm and small-contribution plans on CommonsTransition.

For anyone who's interested, I've start a new thread to talk about the relationship between apps and platforms, so this thread can remain focused on the topic of the request for a chat feature in Loomio.

I can't agree more.Those who wants loomio-chat can imagine more its need and function. You won't always need to create chat groups on traditional chats and ask people for their phone numbers or need to be part of these privency murders and exploiters.
You would see easily if any group member is online and have contact with, etc.

That is a good distinction Bob. Thank you for clarifications and insights James.

I would love to be able to use Loomio in seamless and intuitive way with other FLOSS apps, platforms and services/features, but until this happens it is pain in the ass to get non-technical people to join and very technical people to embrace it as one more system to use for single functionality :-/

So, for those looking for free code chat software, there's a table taking shape, with a number of chat apps and some basic info about them. It would be great if people could share their experiences with any of these, good or bad, recently or a while ago, from an end user perspective or a sysadmin/ developer perspective. If anyone is up to join and organised testing team that has a regular online chat using different chat systems, please get in touch.

To avoid posting a bit wall of text here, I've recorded some of my experiences with the various apps in the table in a blog post. Tl;DR I think the Etherpad and MetaMaps chat systems would be the first things to experiment with, and more complex integrations with Jitsi and Mumble might be good for more ambitious long-term solutions.

Wire is another fully free code chat app, with end-to-end encryption. It supports text chat and voice and video calls, although so far I've only tested the text chat. You can use the standard Wire server (with some limitations), or run your own.