As I understand from various inputs from all of you, we are now trying to get some decent service proposition up and running, for which we largely copy the technical adaptations to Greenlight developed by ColloCall, but offering a more participatory process, i.e. building a community with users and members with the horizon of constituting a real platform coop.
In that light, I’d say both options could work together, and my preference would be to do so under the common brand of The Online Meeting Cooperative with meet.coop subdomains. So we make sure we don’t split the community and signal the common effort that goes into this project. Of course organisations who want a dedicated GL container or even dedicated BBB server can wish whatever domain and customisation, as long as they pay for it. But even then, we should seek to channel part of the funds (paid by such customer to a partner) towards the collective as compensation for the investments done collectively.
That could mean, IMHO:
[quote=“benhylau, post:15, topic:134”]
Option 1
What @chris proposes, to distribute the manual account creation and maintenance to member orgs. People arriving to Meet.coop are greeted with a form like what @decentral1se referenced in Governance Model they make a subscription on OC or Stripe, and wait for an email with account details within some time frame we commit to.[/quote]
Webarchitects could offer a GL container webarchitects1.meet.coop for the (to be) defined “Service Level 1” and welcome its members wishing such service level there. Likewise all producer members could do so. We need to agree which fraction of the paid contributions goes to the collective fund.
What if we’d do that, have like the “official” service sign up through OpenCollective, hosted by OpenCoop?
- A user would need to register at OC, choose the Meet.coop Service Level, make the payment (recurring? Or 6/12 month commitment?)
- Would we then send an invite link to such user to sign up at the selected GL container?
- a team should be reviewing periodically whether payments are made by each user or inform the user of possible cancellation if payment is not in by the due date
- The OC will take 5% plus credit card costs
- How about invoices, does OC generate them or would that need to be done at OpenCoop?
- Will all remaining funds go to the collective and compensate the various work from there, or maybe there’s some percentage that needs to stay in OpenCoop for admin work or so?
At the level of femProcomuns/CommonsCloud.coop we were thinking to have a third option:
Option 3
- an existing user (account creation is free at gent.commonscloud.coop) goes to the CommonsCloud form to request activation of the desired service level (currently this form, but we need to make it better to choose the possible service levels).
- our team adds a line in the contract of that user in our Odoo ERP system so the next month this will be charged from his/her bank account through standard SEPA bank debit procedures (still contract changes are now still done manually but we hope to automate that through our WP site and the Odoo API after the summer)
- our team activates the access to the desired service inside the gent.commonscloud.coop website.
As this is a webinterface to our LDAP directory, we’ll need to configure the GL containers to authenticate against our LDAP service. This way the user can login to the various services with the same account.
As stated elsewhere, we did publish our software under a free license. Unfortunately we have no developer(s) to maintain or further develop this software at the moment. Possibly you know of other SSO user account management webinterfaces that could do the job? At some point we’ll need to compare what’s the current state of the art and see what software to choose, don’t you think? It’ll require funds to develop/improve, but necessary to provide a decent user experience IMHO.