De-Googling Social.coop's Working Groups

Most of these alternatives are barely, if at all functional and because of notifications going to many many members' gmail accounts, countering any real benefits to switching, it seems unlikely that migrating to objectively worse tools should be our top priority as an organization given that the place is metaphorically burning down right now.

Laws in Europe are catching up with Google, so that it is possible that they will not soon be allowed to scan incoming mail from EU users or third-party users. No, I don't trust them to respect the law, but it's often an impediment to their day-to-day operations nonetheless.

As to "we're in a crisis, we can't possibly improve anything right now", that's probably always going to be true, if we let it. If an organisation abandons improvements to focus on solving crises, then it just rolls from crisis to crisis.

The current crisis will resolve, or Social.coop will dissolve. In the latter case, focusing on the crisis won't really have mattered. In the former, focusing on generally making things better will have mattered. So I see it as worth raising regardless.

This isn't "we can't make anything better" this is "this is an absurd distraction right now"

I respect your priorities and your opinion: if removing a surveillance apparatus from our decision-making isn't important to you, then don't be distracted by it. There's no binding vote or proposal here to be distracted by, it's a discussion.

However, freedom from surveillance does matter a great deal to me, so kindly don't call my priorities absurd. We're all trying to make Social.coop a better place, here.

I'm not sorry, your priorities are absurd. We no longer have servers, we're hemorrhaging members, we're being defederated by other instances, we've got a complete governance breakdown, and your primary concern is that we are using google to help us collaboratively edit public documents.

Your raising this now is frankly not just baffling, but honestly actively disruptive to what should be VERY clear organizational priorities at the moment.

it sounds like you haven't been following the last few days' discussions @cathalgarvey; as a co-op right now the focus should be on creating a safe space that's welcoming to marginalized groups and has effective moderation tools. if your priority is not using google over that, then yeah, i don't think that's reasonable

I'll take that on board. I've seen crises in other communities before, so I guess I'm pretty sanguine about this. Either the coop survives and grows, or it collapses and life goes on. It's my experience that dropping everything else just accelerates collapse, so I prefer to act as if things will continue after the crisis, and think about what we can continue to improve.

I understand that others don't feel similarly, and I'm not out to upset anyone.

FWIW, I have been using Google tools to review and participate precisely because of the current crisis. Before this stuff arose I would simply never have participated where Google was a requirement.

Your preference has been duly noted, and others have dedicated time and energies to help you understand it's their wish that absurd distractions don't be distracting them at this particular time when we need to regroup and use all our energies to address the most immediate problems, without which there will be no social.coop in a month's time. You may not mind, but others do mind that you don't mind.

@cathalgarvey thank you for bringing this up, I've read the thread and I think we're in agreement in general on the importance of free software, although I also believe that this is something the will need to be put on the backburner until the other issues are resolved.

I just got off of Gmail Woot! It was tricky. The more we use and support free software the more free we shall be. Here is a reference type blog post with some options - http://agaric.com/blogs/daily-business-operations-using-free-software

We wouldn't be on an AGPL-licensed platform if we didn't slightly care about free software.

While we do have priorities, this thread could be used as a general thread for Google alternatives and good-faith discussions about why, why not, using these alternatives, while clearly keeping in mind that it's just for coffee-break chats.

This is a great idea. Some of these are already functional. In my experience, very large groups doing horizontal organizing use Etherpad/Ethercalc very effectively. This includes non tech-savvy people.

Can we use Matrix/Riot for group chat/video?

In terms of Calendars, could a Baikal/CalDAV instance work instead of Loomio? I'm not familiar with Loomio's calendaring features, and not sure how standards' compliant they are.

Thanks for getting this discussions started!

I have found Matrix most useful for one-on-one chat. We tried using the integrated jit.si video chat but it was not reliable so mostly we use Zoom. For group chat we are using Loomio threads, social.coop toots/replies, and Matrix -- it gets confusing to have discussion spread across three platforms. Docs are edited in etherpad and (mostly) stored on git.coop.

I hear what you're saying on confusing - maybe Matrix could be a central place for discussion via a bridge to link up social.coop toots/replies and Loomio threads?