Housekeeping for this Loomio group

Firstly, thanks heaps to @bobhaugen and @mikeh8 for sponsoring a gold package for this group, and supporting the Loomio crew! Does anyone have any thoughts about the existing subgroups, or any suggestions for new subgroups (subgroups can be a useful way to group and focus discussions on a related set of topics). Any ideas on how the 'categories' feature could be useful to us?

My apologies for the 2 month absence. With the holiday season looming, it's probably not the best time to start ramping things up. But if anyone would like to help me tidy up the community centre a bit, so to speak, ready for a fresh wave of activity in the new year, that would be great. Let's use this thread to discuss what tasks that might involve, and who can help. For a start, I'll have a look at the existing discussions and subgroups, and try to put together a one page summary of what's already here.

As always, anyone is free to start a thread on anything they think would be useful to discuss here, or revitalize an existing thread by adding a new comment. If you don't know how to do that, or you have any other questions about how Loomio works, please feel free to ask here, or join the Loomio Community group, and its user support subgroup, and ask there.

hello all,

yesterday I finally managed to put together some thoughts about this, and especially a request to some experts to seriously reconsider their proposals to "break up facebook" and similar, and to go the personal cloud / coop-hosted route instead. The post is here, obviously both feedback and help to circulate it online as much as you see fit are very welcome: http://stop.zona-m.net/2018/11/why-do-you-still-propose-to-regulate-break-or-clone-facebook-google/

As of now, this OAE group is Loomio Gold. This means (a) subgroups can be created as discussed above and (b) categories on the group page can be created and applied by coords. Means also, Loomio gets $90 to help support their development. Bob Haugen and I have sponsored the Gold account for one year. I'll open a thread on sponsorship so that next time round other sponsors might opt to kick in.

Strypey, I made you a coordinator. Really glad to see the initiative on getting this large and varied group organized!

Lots of great stuff here. I'm off to Aotearoa (NZ) in a week, where I’ll be for the rest of Oct, back in the studio on Nov 10. So I won’t be able to contribute much to OAE until then, but I’ll do my best to keep a weather eye on the discussions as they continue. A few quick things.

1) @mfioretti please feel free to start a new thread to discuss PerCloud, and the ways your vision for it is different from (and similiar to) related projects. You could just copy and paste your comments here as the discussion starter. Let’s keep this thread focused on housekeeping (how we intend to use this group productively).

2) There is already a thread started by @Lynn to discuss the vision for CommonsPub, so let’s discuss that and related projects there. @bobhaugen totally agree, this is not the place for projects to hold their internal discussions, but rather for people from different projects to compare notes, and help each other solve common problems. Perhaps that thread could also be the place for a more general exploration of the pros and cons of ActivityPub and the fediverse?

3) @olisb , I'm not familiar with the Loomio features for "archiving". Can you explain in more detail what you're proposing, taking into account the replies by @bobhaugen and others? My feeling is that even if old threads get archived, it would still be useful to have an up-to-date summary of their contents in the context box for each one (like the 'minutes' of a meeting). If we understand our history, we're less likely to go around and around in circles as new waves of people join the group.

4) @asimong I have seen comments from Loomio devs that their greatest expense by far is paying salaries. They don't seem to be worried about server load. Also storing old discussions puts no load on the server unless they are being read, and the space taken up by ASCII text is negligable.

5) @bobhaugen @mikeh8 thanks so much for offering to sponsor a gold membership for OAE for a year! That's very generous. I know the Loomio crew would appreciate it. Could you please open a new thread about actioning that? If anyone else is able to kick in, they could offer their pledge in that thread, and maybe we could come up with enough pledges to cover 2-3 years of gold membership?

6) @olisb @gregorycassel I would like to be a coordinator of this group. When I'm back, I volunteer to look into who are the coordinators of our existing working groups (subgroups of this Loonmio group), and make sure there are some who are still active here.

@mfioretti this spinoff of the Open App Ecosystem might overlap with your plans in some useful way: https://docs.opencoopecosystem.net/

We're building on ActivityPub, which runs on the open Web, and can offer both group pubs where people can just register for an account as well as self or service hosted personal pubs. The first app is designed for phones.

It will develop slowly, though, because we got some user bases who will transition from monolithic systems and want to keep those running for a year or two while trying out the decentralized solution.

One of the groups, Freedom Coop, started as a refugee work solution, but that effort has not gotten very far.

Public Loomio groups and threads have RSS feeds available.

Just add .xml to the end of a url

Its a way to quickly get all the text from a thread.

They dont appear to render well in most web browsers showing all the xml tags. They do render properly in desktop Firefox, including adding the context post at the beginning (Android Firefox also shows all the xml)

I've been using Feeder from FDroid on Android to read feeds, unfortunately it doesnt display the context post, but does quickly provide all the comments from a threads feed, which sometimes helps with frustrations of interacting with Loomio via mobile.

I guess there may well be add ons that will provide decent RSS parsing for desktop chrome/chromium.

Hello @mikeh8 and all.

FTR, the "commons transitions UK" thread is not accessible by me. No idea, sincerely, if my point of view/proposed priority warrants a subgroup, I leave that for all the others to decide. But I do want to add one more important reason for me to feel the "AS A SERVICE" approach as a priority: environmental impact. Consider one million people, each with their individual physical server, each with its own cheap batteries or UPS, vs the same million people hosting the same individual digital clouds on, say, 100 independent datacenters, one every 10K users, but all with top notch boards, power supplies, cooling ...

The amount of hardly recyclable hardware (i.e. the amount of raw materials, often coming from child labor...) AND energy consumption, both for producing the hardware and using it with MANY cheap power supplies is surely much bigger in the first case. NOT good.

@mfioretti Note a brief related sub-thread in commons transition uk This seems an important orientation - and yes, warrants a subgroup here? As marco is saying, this is a whole other politics, by no means inconsistent with self-management of P2P servers, apps-wise and protocol-wise, but built on distinct user-community priorities - the point regarding freedomboxes , holohubs etc and 'rich' users is germane. This is very 'solidarity economy'. @michelbauwens1 - on the lines of Bruno Frere and 'precarious' ppl. Getting off-topic now, pardon me. Yes, a subgroup!

Hello all, just a flash comment for now, to clarify what my main interests are. Yesterday @stripey wrote:

"For example, Marco is interested in deploying a set of open apps for use by an individual who wants to self-host, on their own end user PC, or a Rasberry Pi, or a spare desktop in the closet. This could also be of interest to anyone from IndieWeb who's here, or from projects like FreedomBox/ FreedomBone/ YUNOHost"

This is not completely correct, albeit there surely is a lot of overlap with those other projects. My main interest is to develop software AND infrastructure for individuals who CANNOT self-host their own personal content, data etc, on ANY personal physical server, of any kind.The idea that refugees, senior citizens with zero IT skills, native people living where no24/7 electricity or broadband are available... can use a Facebook account on their smartphones, but not "solutions" that in practice are reserved to "rich" people with enough skills and money to personally own and manage a freedombox upsets me. Even ignoring those "special" cases, I seriously fear that anything beyond the skills and means of today's average FB user is doomed to fade or remain irrelevant. Like desktop Linux. Please see here for more http://per-cloud.com/percloud-and-the-others/

Software-wise yes, there are a lot of pieces that should be common between my proposal (why it still is only a proposal is clearly explained in the website) and all the other projects that Stripey mentioned.Probably, Indieweb is the closest one. but the essence of my proposal is packaging mostly existing stuff to be really usable AS A SERVICE. Something that sure, geeks could still install on their own RaspberryPi, but the other 99.99% of people will simply "order"/activate from any provider of their choice, NOT on their hardware, with procedures not more complex than setting up a facebook account.

I am not only inclined, I will commit to kicking in with you and whoever else on that, if needed. We'll need to figure out how to manage the kicking in.

I've no stance on the tech issues being raised re archiving, durable links etc. As @bobhaugen mentions, what I have offered - if @strypey fails to get a free Gold upgrade from the Loomio crew - is to sponsor Gold at 'community group' rate, for the OAE group for a year. Seems to me, the significance and complexity of the work warrants helpful facilities, like subgroups. Happy to note that @bobhaugen is also inclined to kick in on that.

Yes it's an unresolved issue, and I am probly more behind the times than you. But in this case, if there is no real reason to kill the existing threads, why do it?
My understanding of Loomio is that the discussion threads are ordered by most-recent activity, so the old ones will scroll off the bottom anyway.

I'm all in favour of CoolURLs (or I suppose CoolIRIs as they might now be called). But it's an unresolved issue, isn't it? PURLs ... what is the latest thinking on that, anyway? How do CoolURLs integrate with blockchains? Do you get my point about the unsatisfactory nature of long-term reliance on one particular domain name? Unless that domain name is going to act as a PURL server in the longer term? Or am I behind the times somehow?

Unless you can keep the links alive, I would prefer to keep them where they are. Cool URLs don't change. If there's a server load problem, let's figure out what to do with that.

I was just speaking from ignorant speculation -- maybe the server load is of no consequence... The general question of keeping past discussions alive is a good one, though. Surely they shouldn't be tied to any one domain, or one server, or one system? I'd love to see some distributed system (ok, probably like Secure Scuttlebutt, which I know very little about but would love to get into somehow...) where I imagine discussions could really be securely archived?

I tend to cite whole discussion threads, not individual posts, so a solution that would keep the links alive would be fine with me. Don't know about other peoples' practices.

But what is the issue to whom about the load on the Loomio servers? Is this group getting out of hand? I understood that @mikeh8 offered to pay for the group, and I would happily kick in as well. I think it is a useful historical record that some projects have already spawned from and more will spawn later.

I enquired recently about the apparent lack of ability to download a whole (public) thread in Loomio, and my enquiry was received positively. Personally, I envisage downloading a thread as an HTML file, ideally with some generic Javascript that would enable some of the same functionality as in the live thread. Links from wouldn't be a problem, of course, but links to the thread -- hmm -- but don't you think, @bobhaugen that it would be good to have old ones made static somewhere? Otherwise the load on the Loomio servers will just keep increasing...

Please don't archive older discussions here. They are linked to many other places, and you will kill those links. Alternatively, implement redirects, but that's a lot of work.

Great ideas @strypey I'm an Admin and keen to stay as one - if volunteers don't come forward I could try to chip in but it might make more sense to archive a lot of stuff and write up a summary which links to all the useful bits...? I'm very up for more guidelines like @gregorycassel suggests - and would even go further to suggest we might want to define how "decisions" could be made, if the OAE, or any of its subgroups were ever to evolve into more than chat groups... Keep us posted about activities in HK! ;)

Could be a good idea. Suggestion: start with one or two subgroups that you know would be interested and see how it works.

I doubt that the CommonsPub (P2P economic network software project) will want to coordinate work here, because we are trying to live in our own evolving system, but at least some of us will continue to participate here in one way or another, and be available for discussions.

@Bob Haugen:

That’s interesting. Whatcha got in mind?

What I'd like to do is find consensus on a program of work for this
group over the next few months, to make sure we're getting value out of
the time and attention we're all putting in here. If possible, I'd like
to get the Loomio crew to sponsor OAE with a free gold service level so
we can create and manage subgroups to focus on different aspects of OAE.
If not, I guess we can try to break into a larger number of aspect
discussions using threads.

For example, Marco is interested in deploying a set of open apps for use
by an individual who wants to self-host, on their own end user PC, or a
Rasberry Pi, or a spare desktop in the closet. This could also be of
interest to anyone from IndieWeb who's here, or from projects like
FreedomBox/ FreedomBone/ YUNOHost. I would make this one subgroup, in
which a number of discussions could take place about the different use
cases for these projects (and others relevant to single-user
self-hosting), and how a user could decide which one to use for their needs.

Then there are the folks who joined since Open 2018, most of whom are
interest in the "commons cloud" concept, deploying a set of open apps
for use by community organizations. This may or may not overlap with the
work Bob and Lynn are doing on ValueFlows and CommonsPub, which could
also have its own subgroup (or set of threads) focusing on open apps
sets for implementing mutual credit and other economic transactions.

Basically, what I'm proposing is that we try to identify some generic
families of open app ecosystem, so folks can focus in on the discussions
that are most relevant to the work they're doing, or the projects they
want to get started. I think this is where we can drill down into the
nuts and bolts of our implementations, our tech choices, and our
successes and failure, and help each other avoid dead ends, or identify
areas in which we can pool dev resources.

I'm in the Hyatt Regency room 1301 (sha tin), for tomorrow's platform coop meetup as well, have a lunch and dinner appointment today, but if you were in the neighborhood,

else we talk in the next days!

I am right in the middle on our fundraising campain at Startin'blox, and won't be able to help with the tyding, but I love the intiative ! Kuddos !!

I like your generic community guidelines, @gregorycassel !

What doesn't work for you in long threads @mike_hales ? People could decide to put the most recent posts at the top, that might help alleviate your issues? I prefer the newest and flat options, personally. Cheers!

I'm one of the (many) coordinators and I'd like to remain one. The coordinator role here is minimal and I hope it stays that way. If we ever have intense conflicts, perhaps we could consider adapting something such as these p2p-oriented Generic Facebook Community Guidelines which I've written. Loomio groups aren't structurally so different from facebook groups -- no offense meant!-- so I suppose that such adaptation would be easy.

@strypey , your request for some volunteers to summarize old big threads by editing the Context box is potentially quite valuable, if anyone responsibly pursues it. Thanks for asking. I find responsible reporting to be quite hard to do, and I will pass because I'm over-committed in duties for various groups.

This thread is very long now. The Loomio interface is not great with very long threads? Would it be helpful to open a new branch of this one?

Hopefully, it's about to get very busy

That's interesting. Whatcha got in mind?

The main group has a lot of coordinators. If you look at the member list, it's everybody through Mikey (assuming they show up in the same sequence for you as for me, I am a coordinator). I don't know how coordinators for subgroups work.

@Danyl Strype Is it possible to start a thread in the main group for each of those topics (or any topics we decide we want to move to a sub-groups) and then move those threads to a subgroup after we get traction in that thread? Kind of: spawn if off from the main group? It would kind of be a more natural transitions and possibly easier to get people to come on board?

Also, if you no longer have any interest in lurking in this group, now might be a good time to unsubscribe. Hopefully, it's about to get very busy ;)