Good catch! I'll amend that and split the question in two, so we can rate the engagment independently.

To clarify I looked at this survey draft you uploaded on Loomio - rather than the dropbox one linked in the survey check. Hopefully they are the same and my comments make sense.

I've got the uMatrix add-on on my browser and, possibly somewhat over enthusiastically, disabled scripts to all but sites I trust since the recent Spectre / Meltdown exploits were disclosed. Dropbox appears to need scripts enabled to work and I've never much liked/trusted them - so I downloaded this version instead.

Further in this vein and as a bit of an aside - I've always tried to avoid using Google docs - but often found myself working with people that love them. I try to use etherpad and ethercalc (spreadsheet) wherever possible instead.

http://board.net/ offer a nice pad service.

There is pad and calc available from the awesome Disroot crew at https://disroot.org/en/services/pads although the 'branding' there may not be to everyones taste.

New services for the group, or for the individuals in the group?

Example: a wiki. If we provided a wiki for the group, then it would be one wiki that everybody got to edit. So there would be one entry for, say, "Good cookie recipies" and it would contain the union of all recipies that group members thought are good.

But if it was for the individuals in the group, then there would be one wiki per individual, and up to N "Good cookie recipies" pages on N wikis. Each of those would only contain those recipies that the owning individual thought were good.

Obviously the way such new services would be used would be completely different in those two cases. Which one did you guys have in mind? (Similar situations for many other of the candidate services that were listed above)

Hi Johannes, pleased to meet you :-) You make an interesting point.
I think the discussion so far can be resumed, more or less chronologically as:

1. "Let's install some new things on social.coop"
2. "Wait a minute, we haven't decided that we want things"
3. "That's true, let's discuss what we want."
4. < Banter Banter Banter Banter >
5. "Bad techies are bad, they don't pay attention to us and they want to build things"
6. "Okay, we're not getting useful information. We need to figure out what people need somehow
7. < Wiki installed to capture knowledge and user input > https://wiki.social.coop
8. < social.coop blog in the process of being set up right now >
9. < Mastodon bots and scripts in the process of being created >
10. Hi Johannes, pleased to meet you :-)

In my view, we should think of the current wiki as a shared collaborative wiki space for the social.coop people to create community, capture knowledge, and document things.
If in the process of capturing user input we find out that many users need wikis, those will be separate wikis for the people who want to have them.
So the current wiki, blog, mastodon bots, in development aren't services for individual social.coop users, but meant as supporting tools that will enable us to set up the scaffolding necessary to later, in turn, build the things that people need.

Hope I'm not being too confusing!

@h Good description :-)
I think there's a larger question about how social.coop understands itself. Example: the existing Mastodon instance: there is one instance shared by everybody, ergo, everybody has a social.coop identifier. Which is fine. But there is an alternate way it could be done, which is that everybody gets -- if they want to -- bring their own domain name, and social.coop is just in the business of hosting separate Mastodon instances on behalf of its members, who, if they ever wanted to, could move their domain name and Mastodon instance somewhere else. (I'm ignoring the possible complications of N instances on the same host, I don't think Mastodon is made for that) The use cases and value propositions for those two alternatives, obviously, differ.

Described that way, it sounds like the case of hosting services an ISP would provide, and there's a few of those already. However hosting social media services, as opposed to traditional, basic web hosting is a little bit different. I haven't discussed these things with others, but it's not entirely unlikely that both ways could co-exist one day.

I think the vision that @matthewcropp, @mayel, @michelekipiel and others have been working on so far is predicated on the idea of taking social media back for ourselves, run by ourselves. One part of that is there must be an infrastructure in place to support social media. The other part is perhaps, we've only been learning what this new type of federated social media actually means in the last 8 months. As this learning process expands, it's well possible that it may grow to help coops develop their own brand identities in the cases that require it.

This might mean that there may be a new niche opening somewhere in between social media and traditional ISP hosting. That may potentially exist, but it's certainly not something obvious or definite at the present time.

I'm sure that this discussion will keep emerging from time to time, and as enough people become more aware of an emerging pattern, we will surely have to evaluate whether becoming a SMSP (Social Media Services Provider, I've just made that up) is something that social.coop can do and/or wants to do.

Great to see the wiki up, @h! Is there any way that we can start with the open-auth with this, and create a common login system between the wiki and mastodon?

Oh never mind, I see OAuth is already there! Just not working quite yet. But awesome! I love it!

The credit for the wiki work goes to @mayel , I've only been pestering people to get things moving :-)

Can we actually log in to and use the wiki yet, or not?

You can create a user and use the wiki right now.
The wiki user you create will not be associated to your Loomio or Mastodon accounts.

That's inconvenient, but it's something that's going to take a while more and more work to be fixed.

In the meantime it's advisable that the usernames we create on the different services be the same, and associated with the same email address.

We can't enforce those rules, and the systems will still be disconnected, but that will make it easier to weave things together when the OAuth system is ready.

Hi @j12t and welcome :) Since the beginning of our adventure, social.coop was very much intended as an experiment in cooperative social media ownership as a form of self defence against the invasive, extractive nature of corporate social media. Theoretically, there's nothing standing in the way of social.coop becoming a hosting/ISP hybrid, but as of today such an evolution is way beyond our scope, capabilities and necessities. That's why, as @horatiotrobinson correctly pointed out, we are looking more into expanding the range of social services provided to our members, as that's much more in line with our initial mission.

The indieweb have a concept called POSSE (Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere). https://indieweb.org/POSSE.
This is intended to put the user at the center, and spread tentacles out to all the other apps being used.

Would this be the kind of service we should be considering? It does seem to be individual focused.

Alan: it's actually a principle, and a set of protocols around that. So it's not a service per se (although there's a service called brid.gy that makes it easier). But to your point, I very much believe it would be very consistent with the principles in this community.

Disclaimer: I consider myself part of the IndieWeb community, and in fact just published a Tutorial how to setup POSSE and a few related things using Wordpress on Amazon EC2: https://indieweb.org/Tutorial:_Set_up_an_IndieWebSite_using_WordPress_on_the_Amazon_cloud

Since I received no further feedback regarding the survey questions, I'd say let's go to the next phase: @horatiotrobinson @mayel @williammurphy could you please create a shortlist of services based on feasibility, cost and maintenance effort? As I explained a few posts earlier, this list will be put in the survey to help us identify which of them is more commonly used by our users. Thanks!

Sorry, I must have misunderstood. I thought the spreadsheet was a draft and you were going to follow up with a web form or Loomio survey. I'm not sure what's the next step?

Unfortunately Loomio doesn't have a proper survey tool (not one with Likert scales, at least) so we'll need to either go through an external service (eg. Surveymonkey) or ask @mayel to help us with this using his survey tool.

But before doing that, I would need the tech branch to shortlist the services that we can afford offering on a cost and maintenance level, so we don't overstretch ourselves (for instance, when we agreed email was too "expensive" to maintain ourselves etc..). If you all could come up with such a shortlist, I would then use it in the question about which services our members use the most.

Thanks!

@mayel @williammurphy @horatiotrobinson any chance you had the time to evaluate the services and come up with a shortlist? :) Thanks!

Can you clarify what you mean by services? Things went sideways the last time I suggested we discuss this topic, so I'm hesitant now... Looks like most people want to start by talking about what type of services they need (or which ones they use that social.coop could replace) rather than any specific solutions?

Sure thing. As you may know, I developed a survey to collect feedback from our users/members regarding their "digital habits" and how much trust they put into social.coop, to further our understanding of the potential "user base" prior to investing in developing additional services.

One of the questions asks people to pick which services play the biggest role in their digital lives out of a list, so to prevent them simply sending us a "wishlist". In order to collect relevant data, we need to provide them with a list of options that's sensible from a cost, effort and maintenance point of view (eg. we already stated that hosting an email server would be too costly, so email won't be listed in the question).

If you guys could come up with such a curated shortlist I could then finalize the survey and have it served to our users/members ASAP.

Thanks!

Ok, I started drafting a list, trying to focus on user needs or things they may already use, and separated into social/collaborative ones vs. more individual-oriented (its on the wiki to make it more easily collaborative): https://wiki.social.coop/New_services

I believe we should focus on the social/collaborative section in this phase, what's your take @mayel ?

I agree, but if this is just a survey, why not include everything and assess what members' take is.

The wording of the questions is important

I simplified the list a little, grouping similar software (eg. the three types of proposed forums), so it's a little less overwhelming. I'll updated the shared spreadsheet later today and post it again for review.

We added an article about WeCollective to the Wiki with @jamesweir , would love to hear your feedback. On the bottom of the article there's 6 specific questions. There's separate thread about it on Loomio here.

I also made a private Youtube video specifically for the Social Coop folks demonstrating one cool thing we could do together in WeCollective.

I love this scheme and am really excited to move forward with it! What next?

Glad to see interest around this :) The planned next step is a survey (90% ready) that will help us assess both the level of trust of our members towards social.coop as a service provider AND determine (in a smart, non-wishlist way) which services are the most relevant to our members. The data gathered via this survey will inform our further decisions.

Hello everyone, sorry for the delay! Here's the finalized survey: https://www.dropbox.com/s/iypd8ivcfjbw4wn/survey_1.ods?dl=0

Feel free to review it and let me know if there's anything missing and/or hard to understand.

Thank you all!

@michelekipiel can you embed the link to the survey in the check poll?

Done!

I have been feeling a bit lost on social.coop lately. We have a lot of FLOSS devs and activists among our members with the result that much of the feed is acronyms esoteric discussion of coding issues. Most of it is well beyond my technical understanding. At the same time, I see very little about co-ops, enterprise, or economics. It's frustrating. Where are the cooperators?
This discussion of services and tools is likewise frustrating, because I don't feel like we've got the core community happening yet.

Well, unfortunately, a lot of the co-op people I know who have tried to come on board have gotten lost in the technical problems with the on-boarding stuff. Hopefully we can come to some resolution on that soon. I know the tech team is working on that.

A great point, but I believe the abundance of tech-talk is a consequence of the enthusiasm for the new services, in a way. I agree with you this specific thread is not the best place to address tech issues though. Maybe we should consider creating a dedicated thread in the tech working group and move part of the discussion there...

If it helps, I'll talk there about what I'm doing with/for co-ops. It's independent of the technical stuff (for now).

I'd love to read about that. Please, feel free to open a new thread to cover your current activities!

Idea (which I will also post to the instance):

Social.coop becomes a Faircoin node, and we start using Faircoin as a membership payment option? I wonder if we could automate membership to a certain extent by tying it to an individualized member key that is activated for a certain amount of time each time "dues" are paid, with an online wallet allowing people to "pre-pay" by depositing multiple months worth of currency? Social.coop could then double as a faircoin wallet with the monthly dues/fee also covering the Mastodon instance and other services?

Yes I fully support federating with Faircoop. In fact it could be very productive as it seems social.coop is very service oriented and I think a sustainable business model could be in hosting floss and collaborative tools at a member rate for cooperatives and commons oriented projects particularly revenue generating ones and low to no cost services for community, voluntary associations.

I also love the idea of becoming a FairCoop node, but I'm not sure that it's a good move right now to try to build our member system around faircoin. To be as accessible as possible, I'd keep that in fiat for now. (Even though, given FAIR's system, it is quasi-fiat, which I don't think is a bad thing!)

Great idea. We would surely support that at FairCoop!

I agree with @ntnsndr , let's not marginalize ourselves. We can accept both fiat currencies and faircoin at the same time :)