I spoke yesterday with Gabriel Chicoine (Coordinator, gcotnoir@webtv.coop) of WebTV (Montréal - https://lacoop.webtv.coop/). They have a commercial offer for webconf services (BBB and Jitsi, and a third one I don’t remember - https://visioweb.coop/). Note: 'The third service' is distributed working and learning - a cloud-based suite of tools.
I explained to him the migration process that Meet.coop is undertaking. He’s very interested to discuss how he (WebTV) could help - long term/short term. WebTV have a strong technical capacity - for example, they stream the city and ward council meetings in Montréal and provide strong webconf services for large general assemblies of co-ops and NGOs. Gabriel is also very engaged in FLOSS ans social economy ecosystem here in Québec.
So to move forward, I proposed a meeting with some people from the Meet.coop board - maybe both people from the tech and community sides. Can be done early March. Count me in.
This is exciting We’re making contact with Gabriel, inviting them and colleagues into the threads here and hoping to talk soon. Because they run BBB, Jitsi and streaming services this will add important dimensions to our tech and service discussion. Not immediately able to make out their governance - a workers’ coop? (They describe themselves as a Solidarity Coop - a Canadian category?) Operating in Montreal they’re basically Francophone? But the WebTV arm of their service offers an interface in four languages. A machine translation of their home page into English is here https://cloud.meet.coop/s/XiCYnp7nMK7XQeE
Federation across English/Spanish/French platforms might be key issue to begin to explore in this connection?
Hello, here’s a translation of the meaning of Solidarity coop in Quebec :
Solidarity cooperative
The solidarity cooperative is characterized by the diversification of its membership and its openness to partnership. It brings together within the same company people or companies who have a common cause or interest, but varied needs.
Features :
Five members are required to form a solidarity cooperative.
The cooperative brings together at least two of these three categories of members:
users: people or companies that use the services offered by the cooperative;
workers: natural persons working within the cooperative;
supporter: any other person or company that has an economic, social or cultural interest in achieving the objective of the cooperative.
Rebates are distributed to user members in proportion to the operations carried out with the cooperative and to worker members according to the volume of work carried out. Supporting members are not entitled to discounts.
Solidarity cooperatives are very present in home help and health services, professional services, business services, local services (grocery stores, gas stations, restaurants, etc.) as well as in the arts and culture.
thanks gabriel, great to see you here Is this category of coop a legal category (recognised or required by economic administration or taxation, for example)? or is it a widely upheld informal distinction, inhabited by many cooperators? it can be both of course !
Sounds very like a commons, to me! Is ‘commons’ in the everyday discourse of cooperation in Montréal? in WebTV?
pardon me @anarcat . that was/is a private thread, b4 the public threads were opened. The public thread on tech issues is this one: Evolution 2 - Migrate the platform. Relevant posts have been reposted above, in this thread on coop options. the link above is fixed now, thanks
BBB and Jitsi are both amazing softwares and we offer both. The reason is that we use them depending on the situation. You have to understand that we offer a complete solution for online meetings, meaning that we also provide cameramen, soundmen, etc. We have been streaming since 2008. Our expertise is a/v and backend. We have partners for frontend.
I don’t like to use the Z word but here’s how we usually explain it to our members :
Jitsi is like Zoom Meetings and BBB is like Zoom Webinars.
However, since we also offer NextCloud, HPB for NextCloud Talk is our biggest demand.
Hi! Collective Tools is also interested to be a part of this discussion.
Sad to see meet.coop go! It’s been such an interesting project to be a part of! But maybe most important for me has been to get to know the other coops here, so I really hope we can find ways to collaborate and work together in the future too.
We’re in a discussion in Collective Tools right now about finding ways to expand and be able to work with bigger organisations and possibly the public sector, with Schrems II opening some new possibilities, so offering video services could definitely be a part of that.
Glad to see this conversation evolving so we can find a new home for meet.coop - I have started discussions with @petter about how we might be able to help provide a home via https://openweb.systems/ or somewhere else… and really do hope we can find a secure and sustainable home for the project, wherever that may be.
Whilst I love the commons approach, and am generally a huge advocate for all things commons, co-op and collaboration, I think it is worth acknowledging that one of the main things which held meet.coop back (imho - based on a lot of time invested in the project…) was the lack of dedicated roles and accountability - and the large (and therefore hard to coordinate) and changing “team”. In my experience, collaboration is hard, and the more people it involves the harder it gets. So, while I love the ideas of federation and cross-country commons etc I think it is worth recognising these issues and, as I have pointed out before, that meet.coop is not a business which can support a large team, or that really requires a large team… By contrast, meet.coop could be run very effectively, and far more efficiently by a small team consisting of few (2 or 3) highly dedicated experts (i.e. back-end, sales, marketing). Whatever happens in meet.coop’s future, I hope these observations are useful.
Oli
Catching up with this thread. The CommunityBridge.com team would love to help in any way that we can. Looking at how we can be helpful and talking with our host that is very coop positive. Will be interested in joining any discussion coming up.
I saw mention of finding a BBB server host and possibly having meet.coop team members control a greenlight instance - short term or long sounds like a good idea to discuss. This is pretty much how Communitybridge has been flying, with WordPress as a front end and it has been great. We have not formed a coop because our primary purpose was to be a pre-coop, educating people about coops and how to use BBB, then introducing them to meet.coop to join. We have about 120 members, but not all pay for membership as that is a hurdle for some. Looking forward to talking and figuring out a plan for meet.coop.
On first look the tech stuff doesn’t look too complex to host. My gut-feel is that people in TWG have the required skills to run BBB and even adopt code published by meet.coop.
However, I would like to see how we can solve some of the challenges faced by meet.coop. Currently I have no ideas for that, perhaps we can have a little discussion about it sometime next week?
@mikemh responded:
Great In the next couple of days I plan to make a presentation (in BBB - it has special features!) for the community of comradely coops we’re now in conversation with. Hoping to outline a range of issues that it would be great to resolve.
Rather than a new parent for BBB, i suspect we need a platform coop federation, provisioning an ecosystem of tools under commons stewardship. Across regions & member communities. Different coops = different elements in ‘a stack of commons’.
I failed to get this down yesterday and thursday, will make another attempt today. A bit chewy! Fingers crossed! i’ll announce in Mastodon and Discourse when I have a recording to view. Then - all jump into the forum, I hope! Plus video chats? The clock is ticking.
This is part of what’s behind the notion, introduced in the preceding post, of a federation of coops, engaging various elements of back end, front end and community engagement/facilitation ‘out there’ in the solidarity/coop/commons economy, rather than a single coop and one single tool (BBB in meet. coop). The coops each might have their own regime of payments and revenues (and payments of ‘rent’ or ‘services’ between some of them); also their own stack of software tools to administer. Some of them might be, as @osb wrote, pretty small and tight focused. others might be looser, more ‘volunteerist’ and community-organiser focused (more like NGOs or campaign orgs). A hunch: single sign-on for User members of the federation, across all platforms, might be a deal breaker?
The tech coop ecosystem already has this kind of diversity, internationally. Maybe it’s time we began to specialise in a more aware and mutualised, solidaristic way, on various missions of various federating entities, and to federate better across coop models, and across linguistic and cultural communities. Anyway - I’ll try to knock up a thought-provoker in a BBB recording as soon as.
Hi All - I apologize for my delay in reporting on the May First meeting we had earlier this week. We spent some time discussing meet.coop and how we thought we could most effectively help.
Unfortunately, we came to the conclusion that hosting meet.coop’s BBB infrastructure is would not be a good move for us since it would delay a number of major infrastructure projects we have planned out. Also, since we are already hosting Jitsi Meet (and have invested a lot of time learning how to use and administer it), we felt it would be duplicative and confusing for our members to spend resources on two video conferencing platforms.
Having said all of this, all members of the coordination team were in favor of extending any other help we can provide. We are always in favor of building the ecosystem of corporate-free Internet tools! And our jitsi meet instance is in fact available to the public - so you don’t even have to join in order to use it. And, we could welcome any meet.coop members who are looking for a coop home.
But ultimately it seems like there is a lot of interest and support from coops that might be in a better position to help house the technology and community together, which seems like the best way forward for the project.
Thanks @jamie good to get your MayFirst feedback. I’m not surprised your coord team feels another element in your software stack (and your repertoire of meeting-style) is more than you want to administer and deploy. I’m aware of how much at full stretch you all are, with the Tech and Community arms of your strategic development, and your sys admin workload. In the present US political atmosphere . .
As I said above Evolution 1 - Find a new home - #19 by mikemh, I feel what’s at stake with this current evolution from meet. coop is not only to re-host BBB (which does have unique features and a distinct use-style, and should be ‘in the mix’ for organisers to use). It’s also - if possible - to take an evolutionary step in the infrastructure of secure digital means across the entire free software toolstack and across regions, that can be held in the commons, and also in the capability of movement organisers and the coop-commons-solidarity economy, to mobilise these means to move ‘beyond the fragments’ across languages and projects, and to escape the corporate channels. So there are things MayFirst is great at, that can be great contributions in this evolution. Insight into plural language capability is one. Active community relations, outreach and mutual education and consciousness raising is another. Richly orchestrated ‘volunteer’ contribution is a third. Care work and solidarity is a fourth. MayFirst is far from the only model of how-to-infrastructure, but it’s certainly one that needs to be in the mix, within some broad kind of federated diverse transformative inclusive infrastructural commons capability, across regions, platforms and communities.
It’s hard to turn this vision into a six month, do-able transition project but I hope you and MayFirst friends can find headspace to be involved in this visioning and organising over the next half year. Above I mentioned a food-for-thought presentation being prepared. Hopefully I’ll get it together within a couple of days - then your coord team might think about what kind of viable contribution and participation that invites?
Just as a small exercise… what could be the elements needed to get a commons/cooperative federated provision of services?
You already pointed to one of them: a common account/login way to access the federation.
Other could be an agreement on services and costs.
For example, instance A provides service S for free to members of instance B, and at a small cost for service W or members of instance X (ideally, all costs should be balanced in such a way that there is no need to pay more).
@EduMerco This is a good prompt thanks. I’d say . . federation calls for a pretty full bundle of protocols.
About incomes, revenues, rents (political economy)
About overlapping memberships and service inclusions or exclusions. Governance & stewardship provisions (General Assembly of the federation, a Board? sociocratic circles?)
About codes of practice, inclusive spaces, moderator-type issues in public media spaces and venue spaces . Also interior spaces of Ops members within coops. Elements of care work.
Privacy and protection of members’ data.
Other essentials of the federation ‘brand’. What members can trust, anywhere in the federation.
I wouldn’t want to try to assemble such a thing right now, but it would be good to start folks thinking about it? GENSET protocols for a federation, good enough for now, safe enough to try.
Great points! I’d like to create some pulses of divergence and then some convergence…
Having all that in mind (that could include even explicit http://valueflo.ws in the network), what is the essential minimum to start to grow this federation of Coop services?
Just to spark the discussion, I propose that the essential thing is an agreement of mutual services.
It doesn’t have to be coded yet (and that may create a bit of administration burden) but it is what Social and Meet Coop did before. And it can be done with Mayfirst (I am a member so I don’t represent it, this is only a proposal) and maybe others too.
What form this could take with MF as an example?
We make an agreement, Meet Coop members will get a 50% discount on the 1st year, if payed in 1 installment.
We prepare a “migration package” to ease the migration for everyone (maybe it is composed of documentation + a 60 min tour/workshop repeated 3 times and recorded for those that couldn’t make it).
A duration for this migration (say, 3 months), after which the offer is taken down.
The topic of federation has come up earlier herehere and here. I’ve now made a presentation on this. Longer than I wanted, sorry. (Not enough time to do something shorter ) Here is the playback, which includes some links to this forum and some other resources Playback. The slide deck is here: Nextcloud
Please do give this a viewing, and please do come into this thread with responses. By all means start parallel topics. This might be a good way to develop develop a sub-themes (like plural language, or diverse toolstacks, or single sign-on, or regional/municipal focus - whatever) , but please link back to here?
Update - for clarity here, a separate thread has been opened on Federating.
Lynn from Valueflows core team here. And member of social.coop and MayFirst, coincidentally. I am very happy to work with you all (in all the gory detail) if you decide to go in a direction that would benefit from Valueflows. I think it could work for “essential minimum” up to the vision of “vibrant ecosystem of tech coops”, which would be amazing. Love the supportive discussion and the ideas!
We’re making contact with Gabriel, inviting them and colleagues into the threads here and hoping to talk soon. Because they run BBB, Jitsi and streaming services this will add important dimensions to our tech and service discussion. Not immediately able to make out their governance - a workers’ coop? (They describe themselves as a Solidarity Coop - a Canadian category?) Operating in Montreal they’re basically Francophone? But the WebTV arm of their service offers an interface in four languages. A machine translation of their home page into English is here https://cloud.meet.coop/s/XiCYnp7nMK7XQeE
Is this category of coop a legal category (recognised or required by economic administration or taxation, for example)? or is it a widely upheld informal distinction, inhabited by many cooperators? it can be both of course !
- to take an evolutionary step in the infrastructure of secure digital means across the entire free software toolstack and across regions, that can be held in the commons, and also in the capability of movement organisers and the coop-commons-solidarity economy, to mobilise these means to move ‘beyond the fragments’ across languages and projects, and to escape the corporate channels. So there are things MayFirst is great at, that can be great contributions in this evolution. Insight into plural language capability is one. Active community relations, outreach and mutual education and consciousness raising is another. Richly orchestrated ‘volunteer’ contribution is a third. Care work and solidarity is a fourth. MayFirst is far from the only model of how-to-infrastructure, but it’s certainly one that needs to be in the mix, within some broad kind of federated diverse transformative inclusive infrastructural commons capability, across regions, platforms and communities.
) Here is the playback, which includes some links to this forum and some other resources