Proposal: that the Platform 6 Development Fund supports the first stage in the development of interactive online tools for co-operative development
Austen Cordasco
Public
Seen by 108
The attached proposal for funding support has been submitted to, considered and passed by P6 Mission Circle and is now presented here for consideration by the P6 Community. Please raise any issues that you may have with it, requests for clarity, suggestions for improvement etc. The proposal may be modified or withdrawn as a result of our discussion. Assuming that it isn't laughed out of court, once all issues are resolved it will then go to the P6 Members Group, which is a subset of this group, for approval by vote, as per the P6 procedure for dealing with such applications.
Kate Whittle Mon 18 Oct 2021 11:11AM
The link doesn't work for me? It's clearly working for others?
Austen Cordasco Mon 18 Oct 2021 11:52AM
I'll send it you
Martin Meteyard Mon 18 Oct 2021 12:21PM
This seems well thought out and positive - I'd vote for it.
Nathan Brown (Co-op Culture) Mon 18 Oct 2021 1:34PM
I have a question. When I asked last year if I could share the tool in question with Barefoot practitioners we were training as an example of a diagnostic tool, I was told that people required a training session before they were allowed to use it. Has this changed, is it missing from the proposal or did I miss it in the proposal?
Austen Cordasco Mon 18 Oct 2021 5:38PM
Sorry to contradict you, Nathan, but I don't think that's what you were told, in fact I remember the telephone conversation. The T&C's are that users are required to register as licensed users so that they can report bugs and improvement suggestions and get updated versions, so that they are not using ancient versions in the future, and also share their data (anonymised if necessary) so that all users can get intelligence gleaned from aggregated data. It's about forming a community of users and all moving forward together. Issuing copies of the tool to all the barefoot students without registering them individually would contravene these T&C's. There is no requirement for users to be trained before getting a licence. If users need training, part of the deal is that that can be provided FREE. I'm sorry that there has been this misunderstanding.
If and when the tool goes online these T&C's will need to be revised but we hope to retain these principles, within the limits of data protection legislation.
Nathan Brown (Co-op Culture) Tue 19 Oct 2021 11:08AM
Thanks for clarification. Look forward to it being more widely available. As you know, I helped develop early version so have a fondness for it
Austen Cordasco Tue 19 Oct 2021 5:06PM
I see no reason why you should not introduce it to the barefooted and suggest that they apply for a licence to use it.
Nathan Brown (Co-op Culture) Wed 20 Oct 2021 2:53PM
Once it's available online we will. We don't have time in the sessions to introduce it as we are already sacrificing content. We can signpost to it (we do mention it) or send them something they can trial on a client. We are a lean operation and needed a tool which we had permission to send without any extra barriers like applying for licencing before it could be used. Perhaps for a future run you could licence specific named individuals on the course enabling us to do that?
Josef Davies-Coates Fri 12 Nov 2021 5:52PM
The standard no barrier way to achieve similar goals used in the open source/ creative commons world is to simply distribute the software with the license, which stipulates people are free to use it but if they improve it they have to share those improvements too.
See e.g
Share alike
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Share-alike
Copyleft
Josef Davies-Coates · Fri 12 Nov 2021 5:44PM
For further clarity, no the service wouldn't have to be free to use to be Free and Open Source Software.
A very common model is for there to be a paid for hosted service, but all the source code for running the platform is also available for free so that those who wanted to (and have the required skills) could install it on there own server and use a self-hosted version of the platform.