Prospect: GEN Europe / Global Ecovillages Network

6 months ago they contacted us; today I had a meeting with their IT Manager, Angel Matilla. In 2017-2019 he worked at a cooperative I was co-founder of. Now he’s living in Navarra/Basque country in the local ecovillage and is part of the ca 7 person Europe office (all part time). He’s running a little libre software stack for the network, incl Rocket.chat, Open Project, NextCloud, Gitlab.
They’d be interested in moving away from Zoom. Typically they hold team meetings, sometimes including also the Council members, mostly below 10 people. Some 4-5 times a year they have bigger online meetings, like 150 people or sometimes up to 500. That’s why they keep paying for a zoom pro account (150 US$/year?)

  • for the regular meetings a small meet.coop account would already suffice (Level 1)
  • for the big online meetings meet.coop doesn’t have a good alternative yet to zoom: deploying an event server with live streaming would cost 100GBP/set up + 100 GBP/week, i.e. way too much for several times a year.
  • alternative that might become possible if we move ahead with the Agaric/CommunityBridge collaboration and have an extra shared server in case that would include Live Streaming. In such case we could suggest people to make an additional donation if they use this “experimental” or “advanced” server. For events like GEN organises it would be a possible solution path way. More complex than zoom (like use parallel chat for participation), but worth the extra effort for people seeking ethical solutions.

wrt timing: they’re preparing now their annual gathering in July and expect to initiate steps to join us after that

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An experimental or advanced server with live streaming sounds good. there was an enquiry in the help desk this week, where that might turn out to be part of the user’s solution.

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