What services can we offer from 1st July 2020?

[mikemh]

best use a sub-domain provided by the client

Might we also have a non-coop domain that we could freely create subdomains in? Eg omc. Keeping our service visible in the url would be good, I think.

[benhylau]

Thanks for pulling this together, looking good!

@wouter

“Contribution levels” instead of Service Levels

+1

@wouter

names for the service/contribution levels

I don’t like the “Individual/Micro/Small/Organization/Large” and prefer the new names, but tying them to participant limit may be weird as that’s a number that could change in the future.

Since we are using the terms Members and Contribution Levels, why don’t we name the tiers like this in two rows, or is it too confusing?

Columns
Contribution	Free	Level 1	Level 2	Level 3	Organization	Custom
Membership	None	Individual membership	Individual membership	Individual membership	Organizational membership	Organizational membership

I wonder when an individual contributes at the Organization/Custom level, are they considered an Organizational User Member, especially in relation to votes, etc. when that gets spec’d out. If not, then using the word “Organization” here at all will make things confusing.

My suggested footnotes

¹ Membership offers the right to participate as a User Member at the Online Meeting Cooperative, and is part of all Contribution Levels except for Free accounts.
² Recorded rooms will be enabled on the shared cluster in the coming months, when per-room recording can be controlled through the Greenlight interface.
³ Members may use our Event Server with dedicated resources for a time duration at additional cost in the coming months.
⁴ A Fair Use Policy applies, where members commit themselves to contribute according to the agreed contribution levels and seek to live together as friendly commoners on the shared platforms.
⁵ BigBlueButton recommends that no single session exceed 100 users.
⁶ Amounts are exclusive of applicable sales tax.

[wouter]

@chris

We can only create sub-domains of meet.coop for external entities that are co-operatives and then only with agreement, see the third-level domain policy, for Greenlight containers best use a sub-domain provided by the client.

Thanks, Chris for reminding the dotCoop subdomain policy. I looked through it and one of the requirements is "Users must be members of the second level registrant organization; "

Isn’t this the key thing? The service is ours, to our members. There’s nothing no-cooperative about it that would exclude us. I mean the fact that we would offer xx.meet.coop to a subgroup of members is still a meet.coop service, we’re in no way renting out subdomains or something like it.

If the doubt remains, maybe it would be good to check with dotCoop about it?

[wouter]

@benhylau

I don’t like the “Individual/Micro/Small/Organization/Large” and prefer the new names, but tying them to participant limit may be weird as that’s a number that could change in the future.

yeap, that’s true, the #participants can change, and possibly we come up with meet150 or whatever when that’d be suitable.

Since we are using the terms Members and Contribution Levels , why don’t we name the tiers like this in two rows, or is it too confusing?

Columns
Contribution	Free	Level 1	Level 2	Level 3	Organization	Custom
Membership	None	Individual membership	Individual membership	Individual membership	Organizational membership	Organizational membership

the concept looks very good to me, only I’m not sure the individual / Organisational distinction here: that will depend on the legal form of a given member: if one joins a person, or as an organisation.
And besides, why would an organisation not be able to go for Level 2 or 3?

I wonder when an individual contributes at the Organization/Custom level, are they considered an
Organizational User Member, especially in relation to votes, etc. when that gets spec’d out. If not, then using the word “Organization” here at all will make things confusing.

for the above reason I agree that “Organisation” here is confusing; I’d rather see another Service / Contribution level. What would you prefer?

My suggested footnotes

1 Membership offers the right to participate as a User Member at the Online Meeting Cooperative, and is part of all Contribution Levels except for Free accounts.
2 Recorded rooms will be enabled on the shared cluster in the coming months, when per-room recording can be controlled through the Greenlight interface.
3 Members may use our Event Server with dedicated resources for a time duration at additional cost in the coming months.
4 A Fair Use Policy applies, where members commit themselves to contribute according to the agreed contribution levels and seek to live together as friendly commoners on the shared platforms.
5 BigBlueButton recommends that no single session exceed 100 users.
6 Amounts are exclusive of applicable sales tax.

Yes, please apply these improvements in the wiki, @benhylau

[wouter]

@mikemh

Do we want to talk about “Contribution levels” instead of Service Levels?

I would say ‘contribution’ refers to what comes into the coop - labour, or money (funding) - and what we provide to users is ‘service’. I think we should offer service levels , expect and require fair-use observance of these, and invite funding contributions of X-plus € (with a possibility of “crowdfunding top-up”?) at fair-use level X. Emphasising the level of fair use (aka service) is important I think?

Maybe you’re right, we offer the service level. At the same time members choose a contribution level that comes with a certain service level. Haha, that’s not making it clearer

[chris]

@wouter

"Users must be members of the second level registrant organization; "

Isn’t this the key thing?

Ah, sorry I must have missed the need for all clients to join the co-op — it seems to me that setting up a new co-op / legal entity is where this project is now heading? Because people don’t want to have to join Webarchitects and as Webarchitects are the legal owner of meet.coop they would need to join Webarchitects before they could have a sub-domain of meet.coop.

[benhylau]

@chris I also think this is no different from calling something room55.meet.coop as we still fully operate the service. The organization does not manage the domain. They cannot create DNS records or subdivide that domain.

+1 with @wouter on seeking clarification. If dotCoop says no we should register a non-coop domain as an option for non-cooperatives.

[benhylau]

Footnotes applied to wiki.

@wouter

for the above reason I agree that “Organisation” here is confusing; I’d rather see another Service / Contribution level. What would you prefer?

Yes that is also my concern. We use Organisation to indicate two things.

• In Membership, it is in contrast to Individual, as a type of legal entity
• In Service Level, it refers to the ability to create many accounts (typical need of an individual) vs. one account (typical need of an organization)

I think we should use a word here that conveys that “need to create many accounts” and avoid the word Organisation altogether in Service Levels.

How about this?

Columns
Contribution	Free	Level 1	Level 2	Level 3	Team	Custom

We also should avoid words like “container” and “server”. These are technical and map to existing tech architecture that could change in the future.

[mikemh]

Instead of ‘team’ . . how about ‘multi-account’? That seems to be the pivot? This helps make it explicit that the other simpler, less demanding service levels are not multi-account.

[chris]

We clearly have different understandings of the third-level domain policy, this is the text of it:

Policy

a. Third-and-higher-level domain names within a registered second level domain may only be used internally by the registrant of the second level domain absent a written license from Sponsor.

b. Second level domain registrants may submit a proposal todotCoop to allow the maintenance of third-level domains for the use of eligible cooperatives. The following restrictions will apply for the use of third-level domains by organizations other than the second-level registrant and must be included in the proposal for third-level domain usage:

• Users must be members of the second level registrant organization;
• Users must be independently eligible for .coop domains based on the .coop Charter;
• The second level registrant will be assessed a fee by dotCoop for verification of eligibility of each of these third level domain users;
• The second level registrant will be responsible for maintenance of DNS information for each third-level domain;
• Each third-level domain user must agree to the terms of the agreement of the registrar of the second-level domain which includes the terms of the current .coop Registration Agreement.

DotCoop will evaluate Third-Level Domain proposals as quickly as possible. All decisions concerning acceptance or rejection of a Third-Level Domain proposal are at the discretion of dotCoop.

If a proposal is accepted, dotCoop will then enter into specific negotiations with the proposing cooperative to define all aspects of the implementation associated with supporting the proposed Third-Level Domain resulting in a mutually agreeable contract.

We need to work out what we want to do and then contact domains.coop to see if our plans are acceptable to them.

[benhylau]

@chris

We need to work out what we want to do and then contact domains.coop to see if our plans are acceptable to them.

I agree this to be next step, but also not blocking as we can start with registering an unrestricted domain for non-coop clients until we sort this with dotCoop.

[wouter]

@mikemh

‘multi-account’?

I like it! and have added it to the Service level page. Also included Ben’s naming proposal.
And I have added a 7th footnote in the small print:
" 7 Other terms of use are defined in the Terms of Use"

We do need to improve and validate those Terms of Use (recall that I copied them over from CommonsCloud), but we do need disclaimers and all. Who’s volunteering for the revision?

[wouter]

@chris

We need to work out what we want to do and then contact domains.coop to see if our plans are acceptable to them.

I agree, Chris. Can we formulate the doubt we have? Here’s a stub:
With Meet.coop we are setting up a cooperative online meeting platform providing services to members. We define ourselves as a multistakeholder cooperative with operational members producing the service and user members making use of it (see wiki:Membership). We propose to use the meet.coop second and third level domain names for providing this service to them. A doubt that has come up is whether it would be problematic with respect to the Third Level Domain Name Policy of DotCoop. In concrete, when some member opts for the larger service we provide them with a member-specific subdomain of meet.coop. The service is still a cooperatively produced service between various cooperatives, but the 3rd level domain name might include the name of a non-cooperative actor. Would that be ok or should we use other domain names for such cases?
Does that reflect our doubt? Maybe you could best pose the question, Chris, as you have registered the domain with them?

[chris]

I’ve sent a email to them with the above text and copied in contact@meet.coop.

[benhylau]

Documented this in the #decisions:approved thread:

Service and contribution levels

At our https://wiki.meet.coop/wiki/16th_July_2020 All Hands we agreed to adopt the following service levels. [Screen Shot 2020-07-16 at 9.47.36 PM]

[benhylau]

We have our first multi-user member and we need a subdomain. I suggest we buy a separate domain meetcoop.TLD immediate and go from there as we need to deliver the service asap.

[jdaviescoates]

Personally I’d suggest we just don’t worry and go ahead and use a subdomain of meet.coop !

I doubt the .coop registry have the resources to police it and given users are members there as using it in the context of being a member of a co-op, even if their legal entity (if indeed they have one) isn’t a co-op itself. Plenty of co-ops around the world are made up of non-co-ops.

Indeed, plenty of people who aren’t co-ops at all are using .coop domains too, eg http://accountancy.coop/ who used to be a co-op but no longer are.

Also, we have already emailed to ask about it.

@chris have you had a reply yet?

[chris]

@jdaviescoates

I doubt the .coop registry have the resources to police it

I don’t doubt that this is true, on 16th July 2020 I sent them the following:

Could you pass this onto whoever deals with these questions?

The following has been asked on the forum.meet.coop site:

With Meet.coop we are setting up a cooperative online meeting platform
providing services to members.

We define ourselves as a multistakeholder cooperative with operational
members producing the service and user members making use of it (see
meet.coop - The Online Meeting Cooperative).

We propose to use the meet.coop second and third level domain names
for providing this service to them.

A doubt that has come up is whether it would be problematic with
respect to the Third Level Domain Name Policy of DotCoop.

In concrete, when some member opts for the larger service we provide
them with a member-specific subdomain of meet.coop.

The service is still a cooperatively produced service between various
cooperatives, but the 3rd level domain name might include the name of
a non-cooperative actor.

Would that be ok or should we use other domain names for such cases?

What services can we offer from 1st July 2020? - #68 by wouter

We had a response on 22nd July 2020:

We will get back to you about this later this week/early next week. The team member who I needed to speak with has been on annual leave.

It is Case 388554 on their system if anyone wants to follow it up via support@domains.coop.

However as Webarchitects are the legal owner of the domain we are responsible for the use of the domain and we are not going to sanction the use of the domain in a way that clearly contradicts the .coop third level domain policy without their support.

[jdaviescoates]

To me this (from the linked policy)…

Third-and-higher-level domain names within a registered second level domain may
only be used internally by the registrant of the second level domain

…means members of meet.coop should be able to use subdomain of meet.coop - it is internal use.

I guess the issue is that web architects are the owners of meet.coop and members of meet.coop aren’t internal to web architects.

I don’t think this would be an issue if the meet.coop domain were owned by meet.coop the co-op.

Can unincorporated co-ops own domains?

[jdaviescoates]

@chris

It is Case 388554 on their system if anyone wants to follow it up via support@domains.coop .

I’ve just sent the following:

Hi there,

I’m writing as a member of the Online Meeting Cooperative, Meet.coop re Case 388554

Chris from Web Architects, cc’d, emailed about this previously, but we’ve been waiting over a month for a response and we now have an urgent need to resolve this issue.

In short, Meet.coop wish to offer members, who may themselves not be co-ops, the use of meet.coop subdomains to use for their online meetings (the online meeting service they are using as members of meet.coop)

ie. Meet.coop members would access the online meeting service provided to them by their co-op at https://member-name.meet.coop

Given your Third Level Domain Policy states that:

Third-and-higher-level domain names within a registered second level domain may only be used internally by the registrant of the second level

I’m assuming that if the Meet.coop co-op owned the meet.coop domain our proposed usage wouldn’t be an issue as it would be deemed internal use?

The issue arises because the Meet.coop co-op is not yet incorporated and so Web Architects are the legal registrant of meet.coop.

Therefore please could you give Web Architects written permission to allow members of meet.coop (as opposed members of Web Architects) to use subdomains of meet.coop ASAP - we having paying members who urgently require this service and so a swift response would be greatly appreciated.

In cooperation,

Josef

on behalf of The Online Meeting Cooperative