Participatory Tools for Democracy: collaborative online tools

Thanks for the comment. I agree that the commons need a protection mechanism from cooptation. In a practical level the open source projects I am familiar with provide mostly the same freedoms (and protection of those freedoms) than free software projects. They differ in some licensing specifics which are for me difficult to comprehend in its details.

The Open Definition - which for me as an artist is more relevant than software licenses - speaks of freedoms. For something to be open it needs to come with certain freedoms, for something to be free it needs to be open. To say free is the better label than open is for me not such a useful distinction, and as said before creates unnecessary faction building.

That is disappointing to hear.
Differences are huge.
As an artist you should be more careful of simplifications and reductivism.

@zblace : I think your comment is quite harsh. Perhaps different issues got convoluted.

(a) I initially reacted to the article that Steve linked above; for me Stallmanns distinction between free software as social movement vs. open source as software development method doesn't match with my experience and interactions with people. It's a bit of a simplification. It has also this taste of righteousness which I find problematic because it excludes more than it includes; it creates the us vs. them mentality.

(b) The myriad of software licenses used for free or open source projects can be a bit overwhelming, call me a simple mind but I would bet not many people of ECA could tell what is the difference between the MIT and the GNU Lesser General Public License as well. Especially for me as an artist not working with code they are not so useful after all, the open definition has been for me more helpful for guidance how I can deal with non-code objects and how I can explain it to other people.

Thank you all for the side thread about free and open. Is it possible in Loomio to extract these comments into their own thread?

Back on the survey, that list is very far from being complete. But thinking about a collective software inventory, which would allow for a continuous evaluation, never went any far.

Regarding alternatives to Google Forms, @silkehelfrich and us have been using https://co-munity.net/ (from Ecobytes) quite successfully for simple questionaires. Regarding forms, I've also always wanted to play with https://www.tellform.com/.

Other alternatives were:

• https://framaforms.org/ (from our network, Framasoft)
• https://surveyjs.io/
• https://ec.europa.eu/eusurvey/

Pardon me, I must have requested to split this thread into two before closing, one for the GNU discussion, and the other for maintaining the survey.

Oh My Good!!!, I feel very much the mess that I have caused :cry:
I honestly would not let me fill in the line below and I thought I was able to fill it out directly on the main line. My most sincere apologies and thanks to @jonrichter for having solved it.

Dear all,
The survey feels OK to me!
Are we going to inform Nicole about this?
Or we simply share and launch it in the commonswatch mailinglist?
Let´s set a deadline to fill it in so that we can the send a reminder :)

Best!
Alice

I would suggest we briefly discuss the survey and it's distribution in the next work group meeting. The survey makes only sense if a large portion of ECA membership takes part, especially those which are not here in Loomio.

has the meeting been launched somewhere ?