Participatory Tools for Democracy: collaborative online tools

Picking up the discussion from the "meet the working group" thread on the audio/video conferencing tool this group prefers for its online meetings. The first session was held on appear.in with two participants, audio quality was okay, but there were several drop-outs. The second session was held on Zoom with 5 people. The quality was decent with no drop out. But the choice of Zoom as platform prevented 1 person to take part because of ideological reasons (I suppose). 2 people of the work group reported quality issues with jitsi with larger groups (4 or more). 2 people had good experience with Zoom also with larger groups. Any thoughts how to move on for the next sessions? While I agree that we should embrace open source solutions whenever possible, for me conference calls are an exception, the only criteria for me here is audio quality.

I would also like to add the question, on what platform we want to keep our meeting notes and collective writings in the future. ECA#s choice was hackpad, but that's moving to drop-box paper. Please share your suggestions.

Great discussion this morning - lovely to meet everyone.

I would prefer a 'not-for-paid' option for online meeting, but Zoom worked well today, and, as @oliverkalleinen suggests, that's the primary concern. Having said that, just because jitsi didn't work once, I'm not certain that it should be abandoned always. Perhaps we could give it one more try? Or rocket.chat?

I s'pose a similar argument can be had for real-time note taking? Google Docs worked well today, but cryptpad didn't :( There are other alternatives, though - https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/ for instance?

As for documenting in general? As I'm a student, I get unlimited private GitHub repositories, so I use that for EVERYTHING (I write in markdown). But I consider it a geek tool; i.e. I'm not sure it's for everyone. Besides, I'm pretty sure you could make the same 'It has a paid option!' argument against GitHub as you could against Zoom.

Hohum - I realise that's a set of issues rather than solutions - sorry!

patchwork/scuttlebutt looks really interesting! https://github.com/ssbc

And here's an article about it: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/05/meet-the-counterantidisintermediationists/527553/

Hi, here is a preview of the ECA tools survey Tiago and me were preparing. Please have a look but don't fill the survey yet. We would appreciate your feedback for improving it. We thought to send it out in a week or so. Thanks.

Thanks Oliver for sharing the edit link. I have removed the misplaced fields Margarita Rodríguez Ibáñez and [email protected] and introduced a separation between free and open source and proprietary tools. I think this is a useful distinction in the context of a Commons Alliance.

In separating the various choices of section II, it became apparent they can be grouped in multiple ways. Section III then is most interesting, as it presents requirements and distinguishes different use cases. To develop those, before bringing in solutions, helps to differentiate the problematcs, which the tools are designed to tackle.

Section IIII also already contains an answer to the Loomio part in a question field: Maybe it is possible to advertise in all the official information from ACE (press, web, wikipedia ..) understood as the place of information and contacting with the working groups..

I like the distinction between free and open - it's important. In fact, I was just reading about that yesterday: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.en.html

Thanks Jon and Steve. Happy that somebody is still posting here. I think Margarita clicked the link and filled the questionnaire, that's why there was the name and email in the name field, also the original Loomio question was overwritten by an answer. I reverted to the original question: "What suggestions you have to improve Loomio for ECA purposes?" Thanks for introducing the distinction between proprietary and open source in the survey. I would of course have preferred to use an open source alternative on our own server compared to Google Forms for the survey itself.

While I agree that the distinction between "free" and "open source" can be made, in my daily work this distinctions seems really far out since most people I deal with don't even know or care what's the difference between proprietary and free/open source software.

But @oliverkalleinen, as RMS points out, the fact that people don't seem to care about their freedoms (when they should) is precisely the reason why that distinction between free and open should be made clear.

I just think in everyday use the difference between the camps is not so clearcut as Stallmann claims, he even admits "Nearly all open source software is free software," From my point of view it is an unnecessary splintering into factions. I have seen similar "factioning" in other movements which were really counterproductive to the point of killing the movement altogether.

Dear Oliver and all, IMHO neglecting the simply but important
difference btw Openess and Freedom, creates a lot of problems, as
it directly paves to way to mess up the commons with the "open
fields for anybody's use", and to invite for cooptation. I think,
that the openess-movement made a strategic mistake in doing as if
this was not important, simply because each commons needs
protection. And making sure that free software remains free (and
not simply open) IS/ PROVIDES protection.

Am 20.11.2017 um 12:51 schrieb Oliver
Kalleinen (Loomio):