I'd love to try!

Creating rooms, customised to needs (recording, moderation rights, etc) and shared as necessary with other members, is nice & easy 🙂 The thing that may need more focus and learning is the administration of user accounts. So the work that @David Mynors and @Matt Noyes are into - registration etc - is key. Taking a little time in this development loop will pay back later, I would say. Greenlight is not 100% helpful when it comes to account admin (but hacking an improved interface is some way down meet.coop's todo list).

Speaking of testing, I created a room called "Test Room" and shared it with Emi, David, and you. That part seems pretty straight forward.

Okay -- we have the instance. I have set up the admin account and accounts for @Josh Davis @emi do @David Mynors @Akshay and myself. David is setting up the registration form for social.coop members who want BBB accounts. I think we can be flexible about creating accounts for people who ask right away, but we do need to set up and test the registration process for new members before we announce it. What do you think?

Okay -- so @emi do @mike_hales @David Mynors @Josh Davis @Akshay and I are the team that will coordinate the joining of Meet.Coop and the set up of our Big Blue Button account. Seems like a good number and mix of people. Thanks for volunteering! Time/Date poll coming...

Status update: the Community Working Group Ops team is seeking to set up a working group to coordinate the process of joining Meet.Coop and providing the service to Social.Coop members. If you are interested in joining the circle, please reply here or DM me.

I think that is fine, though about half of the discussion will be about social.coop specifically.

In the agenda, I'm reading "participants in Loomio poll, plus open to others". Would it be possible for me to bring someone from Resonate Co-op who isn't a member of Social.coop? I can think of a few people who'd be interested in being at the meeing and getting a sense for what the process of joining Meet.coop could look like for Resonate. More as spectators than participants. I would want the meeting to stay focused on the relationship between Meet.coop and Social.coop, of course

Thank you, I'll be there!

please do join the call

I'm pretty new here, but I'd love to participate as well! I'm interested in the idea as a social co-op feature. I'm also a volunteer at Resonate Co-op -- Meet.coop comes up in discussion here and there because we will need solutions other than Jitsi once we grow a bit. This would give me some useful info to bring back to Resonate about what that process could look like.

A few thoughts:

@Jonathan Bean

> I see a deal where we pay and get credits

AFAIK the main expenses in running servers are not consumables like bandwidth, but staff time for setup and upkeep. So pay-per-use pricing isn't really necessary. Also, from a marketing POV, all-you-can-eat pricing is much simpler for prospective user/members to understand. As Clay Shirky pointed out back in 2000:

"... users want predictable and simple pricing ... In situations where there is real competition, providers are usually forced to drop 'pay as you go' schemes in response to user preference, because if they don't, anyone who can offer flat-rate pricing becomes the market leader."

Keep in mind we're competing with datafarms that charge $0 to most users.

@Matt Noyes

> Should we host a Jitsi instance? Or go in on hosting with others?

Given the above, it makes sense to work with another co-op who are already hosting conference servers. This allows social.coop to offer a robust service right away, while its techies can gain experience by helping out (ideally on production systems of a few of the conference software options). Down the track a bit, social.coop could decide to supply a conference service of it's own, and perhaps share it with whichever co-op service it partners with.

@Josef Davies-Coates

> if we do want to have a load of different apps with single sign-on I'd suggest we simply subscribe to Cloudron

There be dragons. Wouter would be able to confirm or correct, but I believe CommonsCloud started out using Cloudron but have since moved away from it. I've seen comments that suggest it isn't fully free code, which could be a reason.

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"

Jami might be OK as an on-the-fly voice/ video chat room for the server team, but it needs a UX makeover before I'd try it with non-geeks. Also, there's gotchas, like whoever starts the room is hosting it (ProTip; whoever has the best PC and bandwidth needs to start it), which limit how many users it can support in one room.

So here's a question: what about tools like Jitsi or the distributed Jami (still glitchy but deserving support)? Should we put resources into them? Should we host a Jitsi instance? Or go in on hosting with others? Or pay/donate for Jitsi hosting by an existing project like Disroot, Framasoft, MayFirst? I like the Meet.Coop idea, but we should be aware of alternatives.

I do like the idea of offering more perks to the social.coop membership. This is similar to how scribd.com has perks like giving members access to curiosity stream and pandora radio, which I am listening to right now included in my $9 / month membership. This really does help keep me as a paying member. Scribd offers e-book and audiobook streaming services, along with magazine streaming as well as a library of user-submitted materials. These services are enough but the added perks really keep me coming back.

Offering access to our mastodon services is probably enough for most people but the added perks like video conferencing and the opportunity to support other cooperative solutions, will be a more persuasive deal for our members.

I think we can structure a deal that is fair for everyone, like I see a deal where we pay and get credits like they are used on resonate.is and we can give hours per person and per hour sort of credits. Included in your social.coop membership is 20 free credits, which gives you 20 hours per month of conferencing for meetings of 12 or fewer people and bigger meetings use more credits.

This is also similar to how library multi-media streaming hoopla.com services work, where the commons or the local government pays hoopla per item borrowed for its patrons, and each patron gets a limited amount of borrows each month. But the patrons get the books, music, movies, and comics for free.

I would think we would need to do some surveys to determine how many people would appreciate the conferencing services and how much the demand to use them would be. It would also be good to have some market research showing how persuasive this deal is for future social.coop members to choose to join us.

I see S.C (Social.Coop) offering a suite of services for its members that all aim to connect people to each other. Our unique proposition would be that we connect people to each other and to the communities they care about as opposed to something like Facebook that is designed to keep you hooked and viewing advertisements.

I think to be more successful, S.C must expand its service offerings to the point that it is the obvious choice for social networking and social cooperation. We really also need to work on our branding and clarify our identity to attract more members. Offering video conferencing is a must, and if you haven't noticed yet, Facebook is now offering a new feature of virtual meeting rooms for video chatting with friends. So we really do need to offer something that makes Facebook obsolete and irrelevant because our services offer a much more social and enjoyable experience.

I vote in favor of offering more and better services to help member users connect and to collaborate more with other cooperatives.

I votes YES, absolutely. What the folks at meet.coop are doing is EXACTLY what we should be doing more of i.e. pooling skills and sharing server costs so we can actually own our own tools! The cost is not high at all - it's what you need to pay to host and use your own OS tools... and, as a co-op, they need support from the co-op community... and any surpluses will be re-invested in the co-op or shared among members... so what's not to like!?!?!

oh, and one more point:

d) it's something we can actually do more-or-less now. when people are talking about social.coop offering more services, it feels like as users they want access to more services, but I rarely here anything about how they quite expect that to happen (and as the main tech person right now that would be important! ... I don't want to have that discussion right here, right now but just flagging it because other services were mentioned in this thread ... I do want to have that discussion, and was thinking to suggest a shared general call to get to know each other a bit more and start to progress these topics).

Right? Principle 6: Intercooperation. One role SC can play is to help cohere and strengthen the existing network of online cooperatives.

I like it on the basis that:

a) social.coop has money available, and/or skills to contribute (I could/might consider getting involved on the tech level too, as I imagine webarch is involved there and I know the people)

b) if, in general, the co-op movement is to work, we need to support the wider network, not just think about our own specific interest, so even if it's "too expensive" (if it were considered as a simple transactional service) what is good for the co-op network will be good for us in one way or another

c) we have a bunch of social.coop uses, and I'm sure there will be some way to also use it for other purposes by the members (even if as lower priority, or when it's not being used for something, or whatever)

I tend to think we should go in together or not at all, rather than creating pay-to-play features of Social.coop membership. To me the big question is what benefit we receive from an organizational membership—the extent to which meet.coop would allow social.coop members to use the service for their own purposes.

Interesting -- so whoever wanted could pitch in to pay for an organizational membership that would then be available for all members to use?

I would love for us to join!! What if those who were interested in using it for personal purposes could pitch in for an account through social.coop? If there were 10 of us, that would amount to less than 5 eu/month

By what standard? We currently have 6k GBP on hand. If Social.coop members would find this membership valuable, we could in principle afford it.

Too expensive for our purposes.

I think our average of meetings is closer to 3/month (tech working group, community working group, reading group, DisCo game group). But maybe that is still not enough to justify the expense?
If members could use it for their own purposes -- maybe limited to non-commercial uses -- would it be worth doing?

I love the idea of meet.coop but think the price during the first year is bit too high for Social Coop. Social Coop does not use online meetings that much (I presume maybe once a month), so the price would be around 40$ per meeting. Would wait until the next year when the subscription price comes down and then join.

It is there in the "Recurring Contributions" section: https://opencollective.com/socialcoop

Any idea yet how we're doing on covering 90GBP per month?

https://wiki.social.coop/meet.coop-registration-form.html

Would you share the signup link, please?

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐

Seems like I failed to respond to @Bob Haugen -- Social.Coop pays about 90GBP a month for a multi-user account, so it would be about 1000GBP/yr. An easy burden for us to bear collectively. Not sure why it does not show up as an expense in Open Collective? @Nathan Schneider ?

Can it show up as an expense in open collective?

I signed up using the form from the link in yesterday's meeting and did my first meeting this morning.
Very smooth. The question came up, though, how much is social.coop paying for meet.coop (said $500-$1000 somewhere if I read and remembered correctly). The signup form suggest upping your existing contribution, which I did, but I have no idea if the member contributions are covering the cost, or even what the cost actually is. 500-1000 is a big range. And I'm happy to bump my contribution again.

As it is, there's no paywall to use the tool, but it looks like membership is facilitated through the starter orgs?

Great question. I'd assume the former. That would be the only way, I think, this would be worth the money.

Question: if we joined as a member organization, does that mean that any of our members could use the software at no additional expense? For their own purposes? Or just for Social.Coop meetings, events, etc.?

Following the practice of our DisCO friends, I volunteer to facilitate this thread. ;-)