@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!
Lynn from Valueflows core team here. And member of social.coop and MayFirst, coincidentally.
Wow, so many coincidences can’t be just coincidence…
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…
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?
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@jamieEvolution 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
It is a single server in EU, Hosted by Stephen Dame - He syays: Ideally he could build an autoscaler that runs servers in US, CAN, Europe on demand. Stephen has offered to provide some free consulting and “free use” of his commercial scaling tools.
Highlights of the discussion between meet. coop Evolution team and WebTV Nextcloud
Announcement: key msg for users is, the service will stay the same; WebTV wants to continue the mission. Publishing this: via meet. coop forum, Mastodon social.coop (open public channels), OpenCollective (main channel, direct to all members).
Option A (migrating) is preferred by WebTV. Ditto by meet. coop. Convergence!
Transparency - Preference is confirmed, to use the open Forum to conduct the transition, as far as possible.
Gather and share documentation that describes meet. coop operations: tech infrastructure, collaborator-members, user membership. @andia to lead.
Assemble and share cash flow data for meet. coop @wouter@mikemh
Gabriel to check out (within WebTV) what issues need to be clarified within the relationship regarding money and governance, and email all. @gcotnoir
If Gabriel gets go-ahead through WebTV Board, the platform and members’ migration could be quick, starting in June completed by summer.
Opening three fresh threads, so this one doesn’t get too tangled:
Summary of actions - meet. coop Board of stewards 27apr2023
Governance: @wouter volunteers to draft a format for All members to vote. add a general vote for the whole membership, user and operational member. Also include the “collaborator members” class that was added a year ago…
Infrastructuring: @mikemh to talk w @petter on federating of platform space provisioning. Convene sysadmins from our community to explore @ commons.hour@flancian volunteers participation too. Include Autonomic (CommonsCloud). @gcotnoir obviously. Tech circle obviously (@dvdjaco, @yurko). Micky Metts @ Agaric. MayFirst perhaps (their strategy is different). Oli SB @ OpenCoop is collaborating w Collective Tools in this area. Fair.kom @ Vienna.
Data privacy: @mikemh to convene a commons.hour on privacy/security/national regulatory frameworks/server strategy/coop service strategy. Include: @petter, @flancian. Tor project (@anarcat). Simply Secure (Georgia Bullen). @gcotnoir.@dvdjaco.
Members’ participation & communication: @mikemh: Create a forum thread to highlight the task lists in the four main evolution topics.
Members’ participation & communication: @richjensen: Send out a newsletter about this Board conversation so members get aware of this and get encouraged to contribute. @wouter Rich, if you manage to draft a summary message, I can help sending it out through the channelsmh: do this as a forum thread, announce via OpenCollective mailing.
Governance: @wouter: proposal about responsibilities in the Board of Stewards that we want to uphold recurringly or that need tackling topically. Include time commitment. Include possibility of ‘project focus’ - eg infrastructuring thro federating.
) Here is the playback, which includes some links to this forum and some other resources 
