A thread to discuss practical proposals for regional federated digital infrastructure in the commons, for civil society organisers in South Asia and South America.
It commences with a re-posted email from @mikemh to Global Tapestry of Alternatives, organisers of WSF-TE 2024 (Colombia), May First Movement Technology Board and meet.coop Board of Stewards.
To: Facilitation team Global Tapestry of Alternatives, Organisers of World Social Forum Transformative Economies 2024 (Colombia), Board members May First Movement Technology, meet.coop Board of Stewards members
Dear friends and coop-commons comrades /
Following up on things arising from World Social Forum 20204 in Kathmandu last month, and initial email exchanges with Global Tapestry of Alternatives and May First Movement Technology, here is a link to a presentation, containing two proposals for regional federated digital infrastructre in the commons.
The slide deck is here:
The proposals - for Global Tapestry and for the WSF-TE team in Colombia (Oct 2024), in collaboration with meet.coop and MayFirst - are:
Commence a migration from corporate digital meeting-and-organising tools platforms, to ethical, politically-resonant, coop-governed, digital platforms in the commons, running on free-libre software.
Design and co-facilitate a series of commons.hour mutual-learning sessions, commencing maybe May 2024 and feeding into WSF-TE 2024 (and beyond), on: Movement capability in provisioning and mobilising the digital toolstack.
Looking forward to your responses. Open to anyone from any of these organisations to propose a live meeting and start a date poll, to begin evaluating options and taking steps. Perhaps use the (non-GAFAM) Framadate poll platform:
In the interests of open sharing and community learning I’ve re-posted this message in the meet.coop forum. I invite all who are not yet members of the forum to join (open to all), and share perceptions and queries in that public space. I think this may be more consistent with our general democratic-participation aims (and easier to track) than an exchange in email.
Love & solidarity
Looking forward to seeing you in the Forum, and in a meeting room soon
/ mike
Note
The presentation is recorded on the meet.coop BigBlueButton platform, so if BBB is a new video meeting space for you, you can see some of its features. Recording of on-screen live annotations is one: with BBB it’s easy produce an animated presentation for sharing. Live clickable links in the recorded chat is another feature. BBB handles meetings of up to 100 (and sometimes more) and is particularly good for situations where prepared slides are used - the software was developed for distance learning. BBB also has a whiteboard that can be shared by meeting participants, and a built-in shared notes function.
Mike Hales @mikemh
Dear @mikemh
In Mayfirst we are already doing this, along with some worshops in which we show how to use these tools (sovereign email, shared files, calendars, kanbans and more with Nextcloud, Jitsi, etc.). BBB is not in MF but in Meet Coop (and I personally love it dearly).
Do you believe than an open workshop in which we invite our adjacent communities to show them all this could be helpful?
If it is so, we would happily work a proposal.
Also, some collaboration agreements are already in place between MF, Social Coop and Meet Coop, so it could be a matter of strengthening those. 
Warmest regards…