Sorry Derek, I have been remiss. The next step is to review this thread and then make a proposal that addresses the various valid concerns and issues raised.

@Matt Noyes what's the next step here?

This is probably not just for BBB but we need a lot of testing and also invest in monitoring tools in order to make it a commercial success, I think. Otherwise, it won't scale

Big Blue Button performed well at Open 2020. 60+ participants and the server seemed to run fine. Providing social.coop members with an ethical tool for meetings and supporting other online cooperatives seems like a good investment of the resources, especially if this gets cheaper over time.

Thanks for point out OPEN 2020 @Matt Noyes - We'd love to see people from Social.coop there.

The Open Co-op has chosen to host OPEN 2020 via Meet.coop using Big Blue Button - it will be a really good test of the technology... ;)

We're dedicated to collaborating with everyone in the 'new economy' space and are very impressed by the collaboration behind meet.coop and will be supporting them as much as we can both financially and with promotion.

We believe there are a lot of lessons for meet.coop to learn from Social.coop and other distributed communities and co-ops... so one of our sessions at OPEN 2020 will focus on this https://open.coop/events/a-new-platform-co-op-for-collaborative-tools/ to try and determine the best way to govern this emerging platform co-op... We would love input from anyone here.

We have another session looking at use cases for collaborative tools https://open.coop/events/the-tools-of-collaboration/ which aims to determine a suitable selection of open source tools for different kinds of collaborative groups, which we could all, collectively own...

There's other sessions on mutual credit and the Murmurations protocol which aims to encourage coordination within networks of commons building initiatives.... plus much more so it should be a fruitful two days!

We made the unwaged ticket just £3.50 to try and make it as inclusive as possible - grab yours here, we'd love to see you ;)

Best

Oli

Thanks for the reminder!

Hi all -- please check out the OpenCoop 2020 sessions this week: https://open.coop/2020/04/02/open-2020-reinvented-networked-commons-initiatives/ Should be a helpful set of discussions for us.

Now that Matrix has been relaunched as Element, its look and feel is good. Pitched to be able to compete with eg Telegram. No longer a mysterious thing that only geeks and code freaks use.

Big fan of Matrix.

Mike and @Derek Caelin , IMHO Matrix seems to be the best liberating and federated replacement for Telegram. There are apps for all major OS (Riot is available on all of them in some form, but beware Electron).

Jabber with OMEMO is also an option. Conversations (Android) recently added voice/ video chat features, which I hear are compatible with some of the other Jabber clients, so there may be iOS and desktop options too.

I share your interest in moving off Telegram, but I think there is a desktop client for it.

I like the principles of Jami. But it feels a bit bleeding edge. I’m never sure what’s going to work, audio and video wise and I’m not sure finding people works well either. I’m not spending time currently on figuring out Jami, doesn’t feel ready, to me.

Am using Telegram mostly which I don’t want to but collaborators are there already. Would rather be using something that was laptop oriented not forever-scrolling smartphone. And where significant items can be held in’memory’.

Yes I have, i think it's excellent. But I doubt it has any sophistication like automatically assigning "hub" devices (aka servers) to scale up to a large number of participants without exponentially increasing traffic and computation

Have you tried Jami?

And also, I think there should be more investment into scalable peer-to-peer video conference software that can automatically optimize traffic (I am sure this is technically a tall order but hey - it would be an opportunity to employ brilliant computer scientists 😄)

This is OT but worth discussing, so I replied on the fediverse.

I think I disagree - depends on what ‘norm’ means.

I don’t expect to ever find myself in a community where we can take for granted a willing, able and reliable sys admin and server. I will always want reliable full-featured platformed tools (either free as in free beer, or subscription, or preferably membership based under coop governance).

I also agree that self-hosting and fully distributed networks are a central principle. But I doubt that it will become a norm any time soon (except in communities of geeks) - unless it happens on smartphones, not conventional servers. Which (correct me) isn’t in the very near future?

So, walking on two legs?

One thing I think we should do, regardless of service vendors such as meet.coop, is to go back to the spirit of free software and free internet and ensure anyone with a decent Internet access can self-host something like BBB (BigBlueButton, video conf software) The "Service-as-software-substitute" should not become the norm, I think

Sorry for late response, I have been ridiculously busy recently.... I am both a member of social.coop and meet.coop I have also recently joined mayfirst.coop - I think an international coop hosting communication tools such as BBB and NextClound could become a bastion of platform cooperativism.

If we can incorporate a very strong governance model (I am a die hard anarchist BTW), ensuring workplace democracy, accountability to members, etc I think this really has a huge potential

Seems like we are at a point where we can formulate a proposal or two. One might be about how to do more research into the various options. Another might be to go with one or another of the alternatives discussed. Anything else? Any objection to moving to proposals?

> But if we joined the cooperative, we would be co-owners of the server running the tool

Exactly, yes :)

FWIW Unless Zoom publish source code for the encryption components and any other part of their server-side software that touches it, there is no way to independently audit it. So their E2EE claims simply can't be trusted.

I interpret the Zoom announcement as crisis management PR, reacting to the many known privacy breaches of Zoom users during lockdown use. I see it as cynical privacywashing, like Farcebook's pivot to privacy PR in the wake of the Russiagate hearings.

Two thoughts:

• Zoom now plans to allow end-to-end encryption for its free users. Users will need to use a phone number to register.

• It's true that BBB does not offer end-to-end encryption, meaning that we would be "middleable". But if we joined the cooperative, we would be co-owners of the server running the tool. So, we would be the middle. At least, part of a group of partners who would have access to the service.

Another bit of the VOICE report by Stéphane seems relevant here:

... BBB encrypts between user and server, but does not do end-to-end encryption – just like Zoom (but at least, it doesn't claim it uses it) ... it matters to trust whoever is hosting the BBB instance in use.

Without E2EE, if you're not the customer, of a trustworthy vendor, chances are your data is the product.

There is a report here of a trial of BBB in NZ, by @Danyl Strype

Overall, an excellent experience with this tool. Very positively surprised!

In general, I'd like to know how we can move from "we can't possibly add any new tools" to "we want to add more tools, what will it take for us to get there?"

@Nathan Schneider maybe https://www.loomio.org/d/WwRkLCro/bridging-tech-and-community-working-groups can help...

@Nathan Schneider my suggestion for moving forward was this thread - it didn't get a lot of engagement (including from me), maybe people don't like theory/long text (edit: I wrote some more replies in there maybe it still has legs!).

For me personally, I still have little clear idea what social.coop actually is. I joined in an emergency to stop it going offline, and I use it from time to time, and I ended up the only active tech person with server/admin access, but beyond that, no idea!

Some of the directions discussed here using "managed platforms" (e.g. cloudron), could work very well with different ideas of what is is, but that direction doesn't particularly interest me, which is fine, but I'm feeling a bit uneasy that the current tech plan will become irrelevant, and I don't want to waste my time (there is no point clearing the garden of weeds if it's going to be paved over...).

Cloudron does seem like a great option, it seems to offer more and better apps than the alternative of sandstorm.io https://alternativeto.net/software/sandstorm-io/ Which Fair Apps includes in its subscription.

I see now, so the unique value proposition of meet.coop is that it actually works. I remember having many problems with other open-source like jitsi https://meet.jit.si/
So it makes the most sense to go use meet.coop as our video chat provider, along with Cloudron to manage our mastodon instance and be able to offer more services to our members. We might then have an appealing enough deal to attract millions of member users. But it all has to work.

I think we can use cloudron to install and manage mastodon and then a Wordpress site, and then if it does not cost too much to self-host we can experiment with having a discourse instance, and other social apps and project management apps.

Cloudron makes it easy to self host all our services with a single integrated sign in, and we can easily install these as you would from any apple or android app store. They are dedicated to making it easy for us. https://cloudron.io/about.html

Thanks @Josef Davies-Coates for the information.

And I agree with @Nathan Schneider, let's move on to talking about how we will manifest our mutually desired requirements. Like Henry Ford said something like: "If you believe you can or believe you can't, you are probably right!" https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/203714.Henry_Ford

Also:

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

― Buckminster Fuller

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/13119-you-never-change-things-by-fighting-the-existing-reality-to

I've been using Cloudron at MEDLab, and I agree it is a major step forward for bringing on these tools. Cloudron supports Mastodon, too. But it's not without need for some maintenance.

In general, I'd like to know how we can move from "we can't possibly add any new tools" to "we want to add more tools, what will it take for us to get there?"

Have to say makes me happy that we are in a fortunate situation where there are lot of different platform cooperatives to choose from :).

Collective Tools and Fair Apps are both cool projects.

But their video meeting offerings simply do not compare with this awesome plan for meet.coop

Neither of them (nor any similar efforts) are focussed on properly solving the issues with open source video meetings in the way meet.coop are proposing (i.e. having a bunch of powerful load balanced servers across the globe dedicated to providing this service - which afaict is the only way to make video meetings just work).

At best these existing offering are akin to what meet.coop describe as their Alpha stage, see e.g. https://wiki.meet.coop/wiki/Roadmap (where they literally describe Collective Tools' BBB offering as a merely a "proof of concept")

Also, if we do want to have a load of different apps with single sign-on I'd suggest we simply subscribe to Cloudron ($15+VAT/mo if paid yearly, otherwise $30+VAT/mo) and install it on a VPS.

I've been using it since 10 January this year and it's totally awesome. It makes all these open source web apps a few clicks away (note Mastodon is one of the apps too), nearly all of which have LDAP power single sign-on out of the box. Plus a full email server.

If you want to have a play, use my referral code to get your first month free: 5adcafc820c53c3d

Concur, this looks like a much more mature place to start exploring and it's model seems to fit much better with the social.coop "casual participant" model.

I recently discovered https://fairapps.net/home

I see they offer organizational plans that include many more apps than just the blue button meeting app. https://fairteaching.net/b

I like how it is all integrated with a single sign in.

It includes everything you can think of for collaboration and much more.

It is a democratically structured cooperative society organization. https://www.fairkom.eu/en/node/152

So it seems to be some sort of cooperative.

I would like to support startup cooperatives, but what is their unique selling proposition, are they offering a better service that does not exist in similar forms already. The Fair Apps seems to be much more mature and likely to offer a better service for our members and seem to have cooperative values as well.

I think we should support cooperatives and offer more perks for our members, but we should choose the right coop partners that will help us offer the greatest services to our members.

@Ben Harris-Roxas What do you think about the question of expense, in light of the various responses?

Fully support this. Co-ops cooperating with co-ops and systematically pooling resources is the (bizarrely often overlooked) Killer App of co-ops.

👍 I'm all on board to use this for personal purposes! I have dozens of video conference calls per week and would love to support this platform through social.coop

Hey co-conspirators! I am generally in favor of more services for the social.coop folks! I'm not entirely sure if video-chat is something that I would use if it were provided via social.coop; mostly because I'm already comfortable managing my own infrastructure and am in the process of converting that infrastructure into a hybrid worker/consumer owned cooperative, Convene.

It's not "baked" yet, but we use it for our coop and it costs us about $7/mo for an instance that is always on and plays well with ~8 people at a time. It's built on top of Jitsi, which is rock-solid for small groups; and seems to have a much nicer API for folks who want to build custom facilitation tools on top of it. That said, it does not appear to scale particularly well, and the audio/video quality isn't remotely as nice as Zooms.

I copied the options to an etherpad doc, just because...:-) https://pad.disroot.org/p/Social.Coop_Video_Call_Options

Heres the link to the Google doc. What do people think about having a poll on which option to choose, with meet.coop as one of the options? We should expand on pros and cons of each option before putting it for a vote.

If I've understood correctly most members are organisations. I do not know about members having access to all their tools but will ask tomorrow. I will also make a google doc document tomorrow detailing different options we have - meet.coop, collective.tools, etc. It might help us make a decision.

Do they accept organizations as members? Would all our members then have access to the tools we opt for?

Collective Tools coop provides Jitsi webcam meetings alongside a bunch of other project organising tools like file sharing and cloud storage iirc. It costs 20$/month, and Social Coop would become a member of Collective Tools.

Another aspect of this is the file sharing/cloud storage entailed by making recordings and then wanting to make them available to others.

Perhaps one area of consideration would be to donate to meet.coop, and registering a free account? Really like the idea of social.coop providing more services to its members in addition to Mastodon instance.

Copying this toot from Wouter Tebbens @wouter:
"We're currently pooling resources to get a first BBB server ready on June 1st. Our idea is that Meet.coop members have priority and maybe more session recording capacity but everyone will be able to register a free account with a basic personal conference room.

From June till September we pool more resources for the next phase and have nodes in various continents.

Aim to have production service ready for Jan 2021. So we need your support now to contract the most powerful server that we can get for June 1st! See wiki.meet.coop"