The third thread of the evolution project is to migrate meet. coop’s members safely and transparently to another multistakeholder coop, maintaining and developing the social relations of digital commons. This thread below contains the brief, job list, actions log and discussion.
As a multistakeholder federation of coops in the digital media sector, and a commons of digital capability, meet. coop aims to facilitate the formaciòn and prefigurative capability of activist movements and groups in the coop-commons economy, the solidarity economy and civil-society rank-&-file organising. Thus, in a major evolutionary step like the present one, there is a need to:
Engage members in an open way (through the forum) for comment, insight and the identification of productive steps that might be taken.
Specifically there is a need to:
Engage multi-user members - organisations that are themselves organising and facilitating communities of practice, and relying on our platform as an element of this practice.
To respect the trust that members are placing in meet. coop we need to:
Transparently migrate member subscriptions to a new coop host organisation; and/or give clear pointers to alternative platform coops with similar ethics and service provisions.
To guarantee our service to members during the transition, when Tech circle hours will be needed to engage with platform-transition tasks, we need to:
Freeze the service at ‘plain vanilla rooms’ in BigBlueButton (no ‘specials’ like streaming services, event servers). - Done: as of now.
To ensure that the privacy of our members is preserved and the continuity of their practice is ensured, we need to:
Make a plan for data privacy through the migration, and into the platform regime of the new host organisation. This includes:
Safely and securely migrate members’ account data
Safely and securely migrate members’ files held in Greenlight (ie, recordings of meetings).
Publish & discuss @ forum - started 06feb2023, here
Freeze the service @ plain vanilla rooms - as of now
Engage members @ forum
Engage multi-user members @ forum
Make a plan for data privacy through the migration, and into the platform regime of the new host organisation.
Transparently migrate member subscriptions to a new coop host organisation; and/or give clear pointers to alternative platform coops with similar ethics and service provisions.
Safely and securely migrate members’ account data
Safely and securely migrate members’ files held in Greenlight (ie, recordings of meetings).
WebTV can’t add meet.coop members as members (this conflicts with the articles of WebTV, Montreal coop laws). @gcotnoir to send links to relevant docs, so meet.coop understands the WebTV legal form better?
meet.coopuser members not seen as just customers. Gabriel (playback: around 28-40min ) believes it’s important that members of meet.coop have a voice in how the platform they use is run and evolved. There are questions about what this would look like legally (coop form, coop governance); can think more about this and find a arrangement down the road. What entity would they be members of? See Evolution #1 - meet.coop Board & WebTV board Define the relationship - #3 by mikemh.
WebTV will hire someone to handle user-member relationships; they would work partly on WebTV work and partly on meet.coop. But in the medium term. This is not immediately required, short term.
Is this role equivalent to meet.coop Product circle lead? No need to rush into defining and recruiting this. Priority short-term is migrate the platform smoothly without interruption of service. If people who are using the service now can continue; this is the most important piece.
Move from contact@ email to WebTV ticketing system for faults. meet.coop can continue to monitor low level of contact@ traffic on service level enquiries, OC enquiries. etc. Who? @wouter ? A person (not Gabriel) in WebTV (with meet.coop support)? @gcotnoir to set up ticketing.
meet.coop members (individuals and organisations) will not directly be members of WebTV. So their subscriptions will not as such be WebTV subscriptions. meet.coop collects subscriptions thro OpenCollective, with Platform6 (Graham) as fiscal host.
Gabriel isn’t too familiar with OC; so need to get a better sense of how the system works.
meet.coop should assemble the financial numbers for current subscriptions and outgoings (server rental etc). @mikemh pick this up, with @wouterDoneNextcloud
WebTV could set up its own OC account as fiscal host, then the meet.coop collective could be migrated to that. Then subscriptions could be drawn down directly and transparently into WebTV bank account. A pretty simple transition.
All the subscription income to flow to WebTV, for platform hosting, users’ tech support, front-end worker? Except: server rentals paid direct from OC as currently? Maybe some income reserved for meet.coop activity (eg stipend for an ‘ops team’ to field incoming enquiries, outside of WebTV tech support scope)? To be decided: @Stewards .
At some point before long, open a conversation between WebTV accountant @gcotnoir , Platform6 @Graham , @evolution team.
Might meet.coop members have access to other services in addition to BBB? For example, within the WebTV Visioweb package, there is Jitsi. In the WebTV Nuage package there is the NextCloud toolstack. Two aspects:
Might a meet.coop BBB subscription be supplemented by a user member, giving access to other services? At what additional cost? Carried by individual members or by meet.coop? (Note: a parallel example: in social.coop, members get Mastodon as core, plus for free they can choose to have BBB - which is provided by meet.coop to social.coop, via a multi-user account paid for by social.coop). To be explored