On 2020-11-16 19:20 +0000, John Lines wrote: > Many people are members of small organisations who are moving online -and > the only option they can find and understand is to create a Facebook > Group, use Facebook messenger or WhatsApp to communicate, and Zoom for > meetings. > Debian developers know there are alternatives, but setting up email > servers, Wordpress, Instant Messenger, ActivityPub servers, jitsi etc does > not appeal to a group whose interests lie not in the technology, but in > what it can do for them. > I have written > at https://wordpress.debian.social/jlines/2020/11/07/the-ambridge-garden-club/ about > a such a group, as I am interested to know if others feel this is also a > problem, and a one worth trying to solve. Definitely. I have been frustrated that our local charity has to pay zoom several hundred pounds to hold our AGM virtually because they want some of the advanced features which cost money (broadcasting with central control of audio and attendees not visible). They have no idea that things like Big Blue Button exist (which I suspect, but don't know) also has these features. And even if they did know they have no technical expertise/bandwidth to set it up. Similarly it would be great if _everything_ wasn't only on twitter and facebook and somethings made it to matrix, disapora and mastodon. But the network effect is really powerful here, and groups might discover these things if they had their own service for some other reason (such as wanting jitsi/wordpress/BBB services they controlled). > My proposed solution is a Debian Pure Blend for a Small Organisation > Server (sos) designed to be installed at a hosting provider, and accessed > and administered through a web interface. It shares quite a lot of > similarity, and should probably, have as much as possible in common with > the FreedomBox project - for example probably plinth. Another relevant model is framasoft, who provide these services (as a collective service, rather than a per-organisation server), but would like many more organsations to do this. I don't know how easily reproducible their setup is. > It is differentiated from FreedomBox at at technical level by, for > example, not using avahi - the Small Organisation Sever would share a > local network at an ISP with other completely unrelated servers, neither > would should it depend on netcat-openbsd, ppp, pppoe etc, which are > targetted at a different situation. Does it need to be a new blend to work, or can it be a config option on freedombox? The targets are so similar it seems like we ought to be able to use the same codebase? I have not followed the project closely after the first year or two so don't actually know exactly how it is now. > I think it would be good to be able to provide the facilities available > via https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DebianSocial to other organisations, and > wonder it you agree ? I think this is a worthy technical goal. Given the decade it has taken for Fredombox to get this far I suspect the pandemic will be over before we get something working at a reasonably numpty-proof level, unless an impressive level of enthusiasm is collected and applied. I have just set up a small server yesterday in order to experiment with this stuff (setting up matrix-synapse initially, but jangouts and BBB are also of interest, although neither are packaged). So yes, knock something up and I will be happy to at least test it. Wookey -- Principal hats: Linaro, Debian, Wookware, ARM http://wookware.org/
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