Contributing to our git repos at git.coop

The Online Meeting Co-operative git repos are hosted on the GitLab instance at git.coop:

Currently all our repos (apart from the one for the Bind9 DNS zone file) are public, so anyone can browse the code and issues.

However this GitLab server doesn’t have open account registration , accounts on git.coop are available for members of Webarchitects Co-operative (see this Loomio thread for the history behind this), the meet.coop email domain is whitelisted there so there are currently two options for account creation:

  1. Join Webarchitects.
  2. Request a @meet.coop email alias to be used for account creation.

We are using the GNU GPLv3 for the code we are writing.

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Hi folks :wave:, I’m working-owning with Autonomic Coop (UK based, CoTech member) and was invited to join this weeks meeting by @chrisc but missed it (:see_no_evil:). However, I wanted to try and support the Ansible work and am making this post to 1. say hi 2. ask for access to https://git.coop/meet (following @chrisc’s recommendation)

EDIT: access granted :door:

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Thanks for all your work today adding Molecule tests for the BBB role via Docker in Docker on the git.coop CI runner today @decentral1se, it is most appreciated! :+1:

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Hi @chris,

I’d also like to have access to the repo. Let’s do the meet.coop alias for now and follow up on the discussion about femProcomuns and Webarchitects becoming mutual members :wink:

Cheers,
^dj

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No problem, you have an alias, see the pm I just sent you, Webarchitects agreed to join after Open 2018 when I first met @wouter, if I recall correctly :slight_smile:.

Hehe ok, I’ll move it on our side and let you know!

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Hi @chris, benedict yurko elon would like to get access to the git.coop/meet, we can either

  • all get a @meet.coop alias that forwards to our hypha email
  • or, have @hypha.coop temporarily whitelisted for account creation on the git server

It seems the first option is cleaner, but I’ll leave it to you to decide best option here. The three handles I put above are our hypha.coop emails and also can be used for meet.coop email aliases. Thanks!

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Hi @benhylau given that Hypha hasn’t formally committed to membership of The Online Meeting Co-operative it doesn’t seem right to create @meet.coop email aliases for your members…

Is joining Webarchitects Co-operative either as individuals or as an organisation really too much to ask? If the problem is money feel free to complete the membership form with only a committent to buy just one £1 share…

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Hi @chris I have updated the Contributions page to make clear Hypha’s commitment of 40h to the project. I apologize for not making that explicit in the last meeting, but that was the intention that we will be contributing time.

Regarding joining Webarchitects, the £10 individual share is not the barrier for us, but we have not had time to review what else membership entails, and expect to learn more about an organization before joining as a member. After this crunch time to have Meet.coop set up, I hope to have a call with you and perhaps meet others at Webarchitects to learn about our organizations.

In the meantime, is what I wrote in the Contributions page sufficient to create alias for the three of us? Thanks.

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Thanks for asking, I’ll try and explain a little here to also help others reading this thread in the future.

Webarch Co-operative Limited (Webarchitects) is a multi-stakeholder co-operative registered via the UK Financial Conduct Authority as a co-operative society (our annual accounts are available to the public on the FCA site) using the model rules from somerset.coop (who are also members), these rules were originally developed for the Ecological Land Co-operative, our rules are available on our website, our purpose is:

To enable the provision of internet based services for socially responsible groups and individuals, using free open source software wherever possible, in a manner that aims to minimise fossil fuel usage and ecological impacts and which also provides sustainable employment

Our co-op has three classes of members, workers, clients and partners and
investors. The maximum share of votes at meeting is limited to 50% for the workers, 25% clients and partners and 25% for the investors, however we make almost all of our decisions based on consensus and hardly ever resort to voting. We have 4 worker members (I’m the only full time one, there is one other techie and the treasurer and secretary), we have around 200+ clients and partner members and a handful of investors with relatively small investments. All the workers are all paid at the same (low) hourly rate.

We have rackspace in a local data centre where they have a electricity meter specifically for our servers in order that the money for the electricity that powers them can go to Good Energy, we generally provide web and email hosting services to non-profit organisations, campaigns, co-ops, charities, radical political groups a small number of businesses, there is an out of date list of some of our clients on the Co-operative Technologists site. We are committed to Free Speech and Free Software, our 2012 AGM agreed that:

All software artefacts that the co-operative produces to be licensed under a FSF approved license.

To join our coop you need to agree the rules, complete a membership form and agree to buy one £1 or more shares, that is all.

At the moment the benefits for client and partner members, in addition to the right to attend meeting and stand in elections for the management board etc, is access to git.coop and our members forum, we have discussed providing additional services but that is all we have at the moment.

The decision to link membership of the co-op with access to the GitLab CE server at git.coop was an attempt to try to provide a service to our members in a way that helped cover the cost of the service and to provide a non-corporate alternative to the likes of the Microsoft owned GitHub. We clearly don’t have the funds of Microsoft so their model isn’t suitable. There is some of the thinking behind this in this thread on the CoTech Loomio group.

The git.coop server is running GitLab CE and this is fairly heavy on resources, especially during the nightly backup jobs and we have found that with less than 20G of RAM the backup jobs fail, in addition it has 8 CPU cores and 196G of disk for backups, 20G for the registry and 120G for root and 2G for swap. the CI is set to use runner.git.coop with very high resource limits (compared to GitLab.org) in terms of maximum run times and so on and this server has 16G of RAM, 8 CPU cores and 80G of disk space and 2G swap.

The disk space for these servers is mounted over the network and the file server uses RAID and ZFS and we store a lot of snapshots, so a substantially more physical disk space is needed for each unit of virtual disk. In addition there is a backup server in the same rack with 30 days worth of backups and also a backup of the backup server in another data centre.

As you will appreciate this results in a service that cost a fair amount to maintain even before you count the sysadmin time.

Accounts on git.coop are not limited to the numbers of groups or repos they can create or the the amount of space they can use or the number of CI jobs they can run, repos and groups can be private or public, the only restriction we have is that:

We strongly encourage the use of a GPL-Compatible Free Software License for public software projects, see the Webarchitects page on Free software.

We clearly share a huge amount in common with Hypha Worker Co-operative in terms of co-operativism and support of Free Software, I notice that you have the content of your site under a copyleft license for example.

I have created the aliases as requested.

Today a member of the KDE community (Aleix Pol) sent me a link to their Ansible role for deploying BBB. They have deployed a server for their community and use their LDAP user directory for authentication. Their BBB service is here: https://meet.kde.org/

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Thanks for that @wouter, it looks fairly similar but we have templated more files than them — they have made more use of the Ansible lineinfile module, there are always multiple ways of doing these things.

  • Request a @meet.coop email alias to be used for account creation.

Hi @chris or anyone else with access
Please can I get an email alias so I can edit text and add to the website?

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Can we create a meet.coop email/alias for @hng so that he can create a git.coop account?