Open Technologies for Collaboration

[hpy]

Thank you @julianstirling, sorry I don’t mean to put you on the spot!

@julianstirling

If someone wants to send me an email I give them my email address and they can use it, no one says “Oh sorry I use Gmail can you make a Gmail account”? Same for phones, they may be are expensive, but a phone will call any other phone. So why do I need 15 chat apps and 5 video call apps!? This will never be solved with a new program however open it is, we need the big players to be forced to agree on a protocol or we will forever be juggling tens of apps. I know this is the goal of the Matrix protocol I just hope they get enough traction to bring the big players in line.

You’ve so eloquently described a major problem that’s always bugged me, thank you! I will paraphrase this when I explain the problem to other people . Proprietary software almost always exacerbates this problem while free software is a necessary (though admittedly not always sufficient) part of the cure.

@julianstirling

“ compels us to proactively develop an ethical replacement. ”

I agree with the sentiment, but we are the Gathering for Open Science Hardware not the Gathering for Open Communication Channels.

Sorry if I was not clear with that sentence. When I said “develop an ethical replacement”, I meant it in a broad sense, and not developing - from scratch - yet another Zoom/Slack clone! That would reinvent wheels and I would vote against such an effort. What I meant was that we should put in a genuine, dedicated effort to identify and make use of an ethical replacement, or at least do what we can to help bring such a replacement to fruition. This is in contrast to simply saying “Zoom is not ideal but it’s practical” and not thinking about it anymore. That would be unethical given the privilege many of us have. The solutions could be - but not limited to - some of the practical steps I suggested in the previous post. I will reword the offending sentence to be more clear, thank you for pointing it out.

we don’t have the resources to put into that.

Perhaps we do. Like I said, there is dedicated funding in the upcoming grant that could, at the very least, be used to pay for dedicated instances of free software solutions such as (and again, not limited to) BigBlueButton or Jitsi Meet. This will help those who develop the tools, provide us with a potentially viable replacement for proprietary software like Zoom, and empirically demonstrate our commitment to GOSH principles.

For example, let’s say we pay for a few months of a hosted BigBlueButton instance. During this time, we try to hold (initially non-mission-critical) meetings and test it thoroughly. If it works, great: We can fully replace Zoom. If it doesn’t work, that’s great, too. We can provide constructive feedback to the host of the instance and developers, while the money we paid will aid in improving the free replacement. This way we can say: “We really tried, and while this solution doesn’t work for us right now, we’ve helped it improve. Let’s revisit this in 6- or 12-months and see it will work better for us then.” This is what I meant by being proactive. We individually have privileges, and collectively GOSH, with its high profile and new funding, has the privilege and responsibility to act.

By the way, collaboration tools such as the ones discussed in this thread are very much an integral part of open source hardware development. Just as we should move away from proprietary CAD tools, we should make a concerted effort to avoid proprietary communications/collaboration tools. Even if we don’t care about freedom (though we should!), this is another reason to put in the effort.

In short, I believe we need to check our privilege and attempt more ethical solutions before giving up.