Free-software groupware strategies lab

Free-software groupware strategies lab

[Jim Garrett]

Hi everyone,

For quite some time I've been interested in advocating for Free
Software tools in group organizing.  I don't mean just advocating for
the principle, but literally and operationally rolling out working
options for the groups we organize ourselves, or those we participate
in.

It seems like groups reflexively use Facebook for outreach and event
management, Google Drive for media storage, and Google Docs for
collective editing.  Tools for messaging and voice are more varied.
Fortunately, there are many Free alternatives.

I've been trying to roll out a competing Free ensemble for the groups I
work with, and I've run into a number of issues.  What is the
best deployment strategy? How do I become familiar with the details of
using the tool, so I can give my colleagues a mature, seamless
experience? If I don't really know the tool well myself and I'm
figuring it out as I go, it won't give a very good impression.

I'd like to ask this community's help and involvement, not just for my
own benefit but to create an online resource that would recommend to
people--including non-admins--clearly and directly how to roll out a
useful ensemble of tools.  By definition, it's hard to test groupware
by oneself!

I'm envisioning a group of people who collaborate to do groupware setup
and testing in order to recommend workable practices.  We would
document these choices on a wiki somewhere (somewhere in the LibrePlanet
universe of wikis?).  We would probably have online meetings from time
to time (if only to test out voice or video calls).

If you're interested, send me a note off-list.  Our first task will
be...to figure out the collaboration tools we'll use ourselves!

Thanks!

Jim Garrett
Boston area, USA

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Re: Free-software groupware strategies lab

[bill-auger]

im not very familiar with the term (buzzword?) "groupware"; but
that description sounds like what mattermost aims to be: an
all-in-one team management, communication, collaboration website
- essentially a free clone of slack-chat, or the altassian web
suite

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Re: Free-software groupware strategies lab

[D. Joe]

On Sat, Apr 13, 2019 at 12:13:27PM -0400, bill-auger wrote:
> im not very familiar with the term (buzzword?) "groupware"; but
> that description sounds like what mattermost aims to be:

My thoughts had turned to the suite of things hosted by, eg, framasoft.org, disroot.org, mayfirst.org, or riseup.net, or more generally those listed in 

https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-selfhosted

and provided by

https://github.com/ecobytes/awesome-librehosters

or packaged by the likes of yunohost, freedombox/freedombone, lollipopcloud.

Jim, maybe you can clarify how what you have in mind either resembles, or differs from, any of those?

 

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Re: Free-software groupware strategies lab

[Jim Garrett]

Certainly.

First, "groupware" certainly is a buzzword and using it may help and/or
hurt understanding.  I'm looking for several key features, at least
initially:
1. Event management (create invitations, allow people to forward them
   to others, people can accept or decline, we can see who has
   confirmed, we can send reminders).
2. Have an associated event page on the web.
3. Online storage for a group to access files.
4. Collaborate text editing, and maybe spreadsheet editing as well.
5. Voice communications software
6. Webcasting (showing a computer desktop to multiple people online,
   simultaneously with audio and perhaps video)

I know of at least one workable tool for each of those categories, and
we don't have to have a unified suite of tools.

At the very minimum, even if someone pointed me to existing tools
already deployed and workable, I would like to practice with them, and
that requires partners.  But chances are there are more details to
work through.

For instance, I just requisitioned a hosted Nextcloud instance, and
Collabora (LibreOffice) with Nextcloud and voice communication look
promising.  But it turns out one must have a separate Collabora server,
so I need to look into that if indeed that is the direction to go.  Or
if one uses Etherpad, Nextcloud can integrate with it but doesn't
actually supply it; one needs an Etherpad instance.

RiseUp doesn't hit all of the requirements; FramaSoft comes close but
some of their pages are not yet translated to English (maybe helping
would be a direction to go?).  I haven't yet checked out the other
services you mentioned.  But everywhere I've looked I see options but
not quite a solution in hand.

Also Nextcloud's video chat doesn't scale up to numbers of participants
(>5 in their documentation).  What about voice?  Could we test 10
people on a call?

For voice chat there are so many options, but for people accustomed to
just installing what their friends have, I need to recommend one or two
options, make sure they're good options, and make sure they're able to
set them up properly.

Details, details, details!

I think the Free world will never be able to match the convenience of
centralized services that offer a service at the hidden expense of
surveillance.  Centralization inherently facilitates group-oriented
tasks.  So when presenting these tools to groups, I would anticipate,
at best, some individuals will give grudging acceptance.  In this
context, every glitch or complication will add friction and potential
resistance.  I would of course present these tools as more than just a
feature-for-feature match to proprietary packages, but still, making
the process as smooth as possible will help.  That requires testing
things out beforehand and knowing what I'm doing!

I'm not afraid of the command line, but I'm not an experienced admin.
Getting advice and direction from people who know what they're doing
will help a great deal.  That's one thing I hope to gain from this
effort.  I know this list is available to offer help, but posting
frequently and having detailed discussions on this list is really not
ideal.  Better to collect this information, post it somewhere, and
notify the community about it.

The solution could be close at hand or could require some work.  If
it's close at hand, wonderful, let's document it and get it out.  If it
takes more legwork, then that's what we need to do.

I hope that helps!

-Jim


On Sat, 13 Apr 2019 16:52:24 +0000
"D. Joe" <libreplanet@etrumeus.com> wrote:

> On Sat, Apr 13, 2019 at 12:13:27PM -0400, bill-auger wrote:
> > im not very familiar with the term (buzzword?) "groupware"; but
> > that description sounds like what mattermost aims to be:  
> 
> My thoughts had turned to the suite of things hosted by, eg,
> framasoft.org, disroot.org, mayfirst.org, or riseup.net, or more
> generally those listed in 
> 
> https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-selfhosted
> 
> and provided by
> 
> https://github.com/ecobytes/awesome-librehosters
> 
> or packaged by the likes of yunohost, freedombox/freedombone,
> lollipopcloud.
> 
> Jim, maybe you can clarify how what you have in mind either
> resembles, or differs from, any of those?
> 
>  
> 
> _______________________________________________
> libreplanet-discuss mailing list
> libreplanet-discuss@libreplanet.org
> https://lists.libreplanet.org/mailman/listinfo/libreplanet-discuss


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Re: Free-software groupware strategies lab

[Dmitry Alexandrov]

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Jim Garrett <jimgarrett@posteo.net> wrote:
> First, "groupware" certainly is a buzzword and using it may help and/or
> hurt understanding.  I'm looking for several key features, at least
> initially:
> 1. Event management (create invitations, allow people to forward them
>    to others, people can accept or decline, we can see who has
>    confirmed, we can send reminders).
> 2. Have an associated event page on the web.
> 3. Online storage for a group to access files.
> 4. Collaborate text editing, and maybe spreadsheet editing as well.
> 5. Voice communications software
> 6. Webcasting (showing a computer desktop to multiple people online,
>    simultaneously with audio and perhaps video)

Take a look at Moodle.org.  It advertises itself as a software suite for educational institutions, and indeed is used widely by them, though nothing prevents to adapt it to usage in a broader context.

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Re: Free-software groupware strategies lab

[Bob Jonkman]

There was a comprehensive package, Enterprise Libre from Cirrus 
Computing, a turnkey solution for organizations to give them everything 
they need. Sadly, it was shelved in 2016 because (like so many Free 
Software projects) the sole maintainer wasn't able to continue 
development. It is now available from X2Go at

https://wiki.x2go.org/doku.php/enterpriselibre

Although it's not being maintained as a single package, as far as I 
know, it is still viable -- all the components are standard Free 
Software packages, which could be maintained individually.

--Bob.



On 2019-04-13 2:41 p.m., Jim Garrett wrote:
> Certainly.
> 
> First, "groupware" certainly is a buzzword and using it may help and/or
> hurt understanding.  I'm looking for several key features, at least
> initially:
> 1. Event management (create invitations, allow people to forward them
>     to others, people can accept or decline, we can see who has
>     confirmed, we can send reminders).
> 2. Have an associated event page on the web.
> 3. Online storage for a group to access files.
> 4. Collaborate text editing, and maybe spreadsheet editing as well.
> 5. Voice communications software
> 6. Webcasting (showing a computer desktop to multiple people online,
>     simultaneously with audio and perhaps video)
> 
> I know of at least one workable tool for each of those categories, and
> we don't have to have a unified suite of tools.
> 
> At the very minimum, even if someone pointed me to existing tools
> already deployed and workable, I would like to practice with them, and
> that requires partners.  But chances are there are more details to
> work through.
> 
> For instance, I just requisitioned a hosted Nextcloud instance, and
> Collabora (LibreOffice) with Nextcloud and voice communication look
> promising.  But it turns out one must have a separate Collabora server,
> so I need to look into that if indeed that is the direction to go.  Or
> if one uses Etherpad, Nextcloud can integrate with it but doesn't
> actually supply it; one needs an Etherpad instance.
> 
> RiseUp doesn't hit all of the requirements; FramaSoft comes close but
> some of their pages are not yet translated to English (maybe helping
> would be a direction to go?).  I haven't yet checked out the other
> services you mentioned.  But everywhere I've looked I see options but
> not quite a solution in hand.
> 
> Also Nextcloud's video chat doesn't scale up to numbers of participants
> (>5 in their documentation).  What about voice?  Could we test 10
> people on a call?
> 
> For voice chat there are so many options, but for people accustomed to
> just installing what their friends have, I need to recommend one or two
> options, make sure they're good options, and make sure they're able to
> set them up properly.
> 
> Details, details, details!
> 
> I think the Free world will never be able to match the convenience of
> centralized services that offer a service at the hidden expense of
> surveillance.  Centralization inherently facilitates group-oriented
> tasks.  So when presenting these tools to groups, I would anticipate,
> at best, some individuals will give grudging acceptance.  In this
> context, every glitch or complication will add friction and potential
> resistance.  I would of course present these tools as more than just a
> feature-for-feature match to proprietary packages, but still, making
> the process as smooth as possible will help.  That requires testing
> things out beforehand and knowing what I'm doing!
> 
> I'm not afraid of the command line, but I'm not an experienced admin.
> Getting advice and direction from people who know what they're doing
> will help a great deal.  That's one thing I hope to gain from this
> effort.  I know this list is available to offer help, but posting
> frequently and having detailed discussions on this list is really not
> ideal.  Better to collect this information, post it somewhere, and
> notify the community about it.
> 
> The solution could be close at hand or could require some work.  If
> it's close at hand, wonderful, let's document it and get it out.  If it
> takes more legwork, then that's what we need to do.
> 
> I hope that helps!
> 
> -Jim
> 
> 
> On Sat, 13 Apr 2019 16:52:24 +0000
> "D. Joe" <libreplanet@etrumeus.com> wrote:
> 
>> On Sat, Apr 13, 2019 at 12:13:27PM -0400, bill-auger wrote:
>>> im not very familiar with the term (buzzword?) "groupware"; but
>>> that description sounds like what mattermost aims to be:
>>
>> My thoughts had turned to the suite of things hosted by, eg,
>> framasoft.org, disroot.org, mayfirst.org, or riseup.net, or more
>> generally those listed in
>>
>> https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-selfhosted
>>
>> and provided by
>>
>> https://github.com/ecobytes/awesome-librehosters
>>
>> or packaged by the likes of yunohost, freedombox/freedombone,
>> lollipopcloud.
>>
>> Jim, maybe you can clarify how what you have in mind either
>> resembles, or differs from, any of those?
>>
>>   
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> libreplanet-discuss mailing list
>> libreplanet-discuss@libreplanet.org
>> https://lists.libreplanet.org/mailman/listinfo/libreplanet-discuss
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> libreplanet-discuss mailing list
> libreplanet-discuss@libreplanet.org
> https://lists.libreplanet.org/mailman/listinfo/libreplanet-discuss
> 

-- 
Bob Jonkman <bjonkman@sobac.com>          Phone: +1-519-635-9413
SOBAC Microcomputer Services             http://sobac.com/sobac/
Software   ---   Office & Business Automation   ---   Consulting
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