Mastodawn

Everyday people ask us where to start with their transition towards #digitalautonomy. And there is no easy answer, unfortunately. Well, the fundamental aspect with autonomy is that many people and communities are working it their way, addressing the specific needs of their community, and that is how it should be.

Lessons learnt by many of us on this field: co-create services that address those specific needs of the community, and build in democratic processes, through #commons governance and #cooperative membership where adequate, sharing knowledge internally and externally, connecting to other communities.

And there, I find my motivation: to connect the fragmented communities, coordinate efforts to build up better value propositions.

That is for me one of the key things to be contributing to the #DemocraticTechFund, to weave networks, to share transition strategies, to document what is missing, to put in motion campaigns to mobilise more people and resources to go together.

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Wouter Tebbens ⁂Mar 4

To make it concrete: to move away from Microsoft (teams, sharepoint) and Google (drive), Nextcloud is a decent option, but you may also want decentralised group chat like matrix, maybe a better collaborative document server, à La Suite Docs, video conferencing like BBB or La Suite Visio. And of course a Single Sign On - one account to log on.

Altogether this is not something every individual person or collective may want to run for themselves, so you need a service provider, ideally a cooperative one, where you can be a member of and collectively maintain a production team and a process to evolve together - as technologies (and social needs) evolve.
In this sense the @coopcloud federation provides a backbone to work together on the development and maintenance of the tech stack as a "configuration commons". With the #dtf we became members, and it is exciting to see what is cooking there and how people/cooperatives collaborate along shared goals.

#CooperativeCommons #CooperativeCloud

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Gert V 🇵🇸Mar 4

@Wtebbens @coopcloud There have been projects that received funding and when the funding stopped, the project immediately "exited to community", in other words: abandoned it and left it to unpaid workers. Is that a valid scenario for democratic funds?

And what is your opinion on the https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/planning initiative, are there possible overlaps?

Snowdrift Wiki - Snowdrift.coop Roadmap

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Co-op Cloud

@gert we have prioritised establishing a membership model since day 0 based on the experiences of Coop Cycle which has allowed us to build up financial reserves and make steps towards financial independence, e.g. https://coopcloud.tech/blog/radmin-open-call/ (the salary being entirely funded by membership dues!). we're still early days (after 5+ years of the project 🙃) but we don't rely exclusively on grant funding.

-- d1

Open call: financial administrator (CLOSED)

The financial administrator open call

The Co-op Cloud