Evolution 1 - Find a new home

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 :roll_eyes: - 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?

Abrazos.

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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).

What else? :slight_smile:

@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?

  1. We make an agreement, Meet Coop members will get a 50% discount on the 1st year, if payed in 1 installment.
  2. 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).
  3. A duration for this migration (say, 3 months), after which the offer is taken down.

WDYT? :slight_smile:

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The topic of federation has come up earlier here here and here. I’ve now made a presentation on this. Longer than I wanted, sorry. (Not enough time to do something shorter :wink: ) 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!

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Lynn from Valueflows core team here. And member of social.coop and MayFirst, coincidentally.

Wow, so many coincidences can’t be just coincidence… :blush:

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.

Do you believe that a small (90 min), realtime VF workshop could be useful to start to imagine what form could this federation could take? In my case (and I offer it in case it could be useful) I model with SysML that focuses in more concrete actions, but I feel that a value flow model could be enlightening…
:pray: :blush:

Over in another thread, @edsu opened a question about sustainaibility of platforms. Check it out Evolution 2 - Migrate the platform - #6 by edsu

I tagged this as a matter of ‘contribution economy’. This relates to stuff @lynnfoster and @EduMerco were raising above, in terms of Valueflo.ws. This might warrant a thread of its own if it develops?

Contribution accounting - Howto?

Parallel thread opened by @lynnfoster on Valueflows and contribution accounting. Picking up @lynnfoster and @EduMerco sub-thread above. Check it out?

Two weeks on

Summarising where discussion is at around the core decision . .

The core decision is . .

Social. coop @mnoyes @EduMerco @edsu @akshay hasn’t yet formed a view on this. Admins seem to regard the platform as being not too odd admin-wise (altho without hands-on experience as yet) but the coop hasn’t formed a view on whether they have reason to support BBB in addition to Jitsi (which they already have thro MayFirst membership). Would be good to get some definition on this sooner than May 1st, which is (?? @mnoyes ) when social. coop will make a formal choice - like, b4 mid March?

MayFirst @jamie Evolution 1 - Find a new home - #21 by jamie finds hosting BBB too far a stretch, would hold back existing infrastructure development commitments. Part of the reason is also they prefer PHP as a (simpler) admin regime, while BBB is under a (more complex) Docker/Ansible regime.

femProcomuns @dvdjaco commented informally in a private chat

discussed this briefly with the rest of our team at femProcomuns today [Feb 1st], we would be more comfortable with sth in the line of what Henning mentioned Evolution 1 - Find a new home - #5 by mikemh. We’re a small team and already spread quite thin in several active projects. Taking in meet. coop as an internal project would mean quite some extra work.

Can you confirm this is a firm NO for hosting @dvdjaco ?

WebTV Montreal @gcotnoir (contacted by @otisyves ) currently hosts BBB and is open to discussion. A chat scheduled last week had to be postponed: watch this space.

Collective.tools and OpenCoop are in collaboration in some projects, and may have an option they could bring. Informal conversation right now. Anything more formal to state at this point @petter @osb ? Sustainaibility of paid contributions to the platform operations (both front and back end) is probably the core concern - as it has been in meet. coop. Some kind of federated provision would be very welcome, both front- and back-end.

No other multistakeholder coop candidates (ie very front-end focused) for hosting right now. How about S America? Other continents? @wouter you have some previous leads w India? @dvdjaco w Argentina? Collocall (@hng ) remains a fallback option, more back-end focused.

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Dear all, I’ll be out of touch until 11/03. Just to know that silence is not lack of interest (on the contrary), just a happy lack of net connection. :smiley:

Best…

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Hi all, copying here a thread on Social.Coop with @freescholar

MN: Hi, is there any possibility that Agaric or Community thing (sorry, forgot the name) might take over social.coop’s BBB accounts now on Meet.Coop?
MM: Yes definitely. Our BBB host is a great friend I have been educating on cooperatives. We have talked about this and are really wanting to get involved even though we are not a coop - yet. We have servers around the globe available and serving BBB to many diverse schools mostly.

I believe that becoming a coop or a coop member is a process of learning and that is why I started building CommunityBridge - to educate people on coops. At a point with communityBridge members that are unfamiliar with cooperativism , I point out that they are already being cooperative by helping to fund the site for those that cannot afford to do so - then we talk about the principles of cooperatives and you can see where I am going… If I try to get them to join before experiencing the benefits it seems to impair the actual learning process. So - Yes, we have the infrastructure and people willing to take this on. Let’s talk!

And the site could still live on as meet.coop domain for members. Does not have to be under communitybridge domain.

MN: This all sounds great. I imagine Social.Coop and other Meet.Coop users could pay community bridge for the hosting. @mikemh @edsu [@flancian - not here in this forum] @wouter @andia

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we have the infrastructure and people willing to take this on

This sounds great muchas gracias @mnoyes @freescholar . If Community Bridge tech team could talk with meet. coop Tech circle @dvdjaco @Yurko that seems like a good step?

I’m posting this strand to Evolution 2 - Migrate the platform - #9 by mikemh for tech-level exchange. Conversation might begin with the writeup of meet. coop BBB admin regime here Nextcloud ? Social. coop admins seem to see this as pretty do-able.

From social.coop: @mlncn

@edsu ) [@flancian @ntnsndr not in this space] @bhaugen @mnoyes [@mayfirs = @jamie t]

Ideally some combination of all of us keep meet.coop going mostly as it presently is, and @agaric would like to help, but if everything falls through as @freescholar has posted the same backend provider for her https://CommunityBridge.com that never ended up joining/merging with meet.coop despite discussion could keep everyone’s meetings going on meet.coop, albeit temporarily without the green power commitment.

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Thank you @mnoyes for bringing social.coop conversation here!

Just affirming that we are here and would like to support meet co-op members continuing to receive services and help maintain the coop structure, especially for use members, and regrow the operational side when possible.

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meet. coop has entered discussions with WebTV of Montreal @gcotnoir (Evolution 1 - Find a new home - #31 by mikemh above) and we have a further discussion scheduled next week. Here’s a note on the options that are being discussed: https://cloud.meet.coop/s/FYjrn6ns6fdR4HD and here’s an extract:

We acknowledge that there seems to be a good fit between what WebTV is offering and what meet. coop is seeking. Specifically, it fits better than other options: social.coop, Community Bridge @freescholar , Collocall @hng . On that basis, we now start discussing practicalities with WebTV.

  • Option A - Migrate: Migrate meet. coop platform services and membership relations to WebTV
  • Option B - Federate : Establish a fraternal (back-end, operational, platform) relationship between WebTV and a continuing meet.coop entity, which continues to have its own front-end and governance

The subgroup of meet. coop Board members that’s in this discussion (the @evolution team) feels that Option B is too much of a stretch - not radically dissimilar from the situation we’ve been attempting to operate for the past year, which is unsustainable. So we’re hoping that Option A will work out.

Posted this in response to MikeH, but thought it may not get viewed by all.
WebTV looks like a great option for a new home - hoping it goes smoothly. If things change, Agaric now has an instance of BBB running on our .coop domain for anyone to take a test drive and see how it runs. It has the latest version 2.6 of BBB and can scale as needed. It is also modified to only run when in use, for low-low overhead. http://meet.agaric.coop

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That is very interesting! Would love to chat about it !

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Good news!

Update (reposted from Changes coming to meet.coop – please read)

Good news! Conversations are underway between members of the meet.coop board and representatives of WebTV.coop regarding the transfer of hosting and sys admin for the meet.coop BigBlueButton instance to WebTV. WebTV has expressed commitment to the mission and continuing operation of Meet.Coop and to ensuring a seamless continuity of service to users.

Follow updates in our forum here and in threads that branch from here as the project moves forward.

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