here is a list of software one might think of, Johanna has probably took some time to choose these solutions, might be interesting for you to have a chat with her?
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Sorry excuse my ignorance, which Johanna are you referring to? And were you linking to a list?
sorry the link disappear at some point: Our Values
Johanna Havemann (active in open science for years)
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Hi all, a reminder that the next meeting for open source apps for GOSH will be February 3rd at 21:00 UTC. We will meet using this Jitsi link to talk more about Nextcloud and Zotero.
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Hello all! Sharing a summary of what was discussed at today’s open-source apps meeting today:
Nextcloud
- @hpy and I were unsure whether you could have more than one user on the cheapest tier of this nextcloud instance
- @dusjagr uses this instance for Hackteria, said that he is able to have more than one user - can also create a public folder and invite others to add files to it. So we were able to confirm that even on the cheapest tier, we can add multiple users. Seems like the “1” user included on the cheapest tier just refers to one user with admin status.
Other apps we discussed
- GOSH Flickr - currently using the free tier which means that there are issues with making bulk changes to a group of photos. If we want a better option in the future, could look into the Internet Archive.
- Cal.com - I started using it to schedule meetings, but for some reason, I wasn’t receiving email notifications when someone schedules a time to meet with me.
- Eventgate is an open source alternative to Eventbrite if we want to use it in the future
- Could look into adding GOSH documents like the events framework to Wikimedia commons, Zenodo and Internet Archive
- OSF allows for collaborative editing of documents if that is ever needed as an alternative to Nextcloud
- Zotero is often used for academic papers but could be a space for other things that aren’t papers, although @hpy and I haven’t thought that far ahead yet! You can sync Zotero with Nextcloud but then you lose a lot of the collaborative features that come with a group library.
@hpy and @dusjagr stayed on the call a bit longer because I had to go, so feel free to add anything else that you discussed afterwards!
These meetings are held on the first Thursday (at 21:00 UTC) of each month, so the next one is March 3rd at 21:00 UTC. This meeting is also on the GOSH community calendar.
-Bri 
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Yeah we had a loooong chat, mostly around our shared interest in general on how knowledge can be preserved and passed on within a community over generations of new people joining and others leaving. A very interesting article, more on the individual side on knowledge management is this one:
We have used similar metaphors a few times with the idea to clean up and synthesize information to make it more accessible on the hackteria wiki. termed “Wiki Gardening” kinda springs over a weekend or so, a social event, onsite / online, with snacks, drinks and fun, to “garden” care, sort, clean up a specific topic of interest. In the end,… sadly it was usually dropped from the programm. it’s really hard work to motivate people to this kinda info–gardening care work, it’s not very appreciated or career pushing, unlike more synthesized academic publication, although it’s crucial as a “learning in public” knowledge preservation.
then we also talked long about interesting initiatives in Taiwan, that we sadly havent yet connected to our GOSH community, such as g0v.tw or roadkill.tw.
Or this recent more media arts related super interesting activity:
and of course the good old times of my first trip to “asia”, 2008 / 2009, specifically also to Taiwan to assist an arduino and DIY microscopy workshop with strong focus on FLOSS, and my first time installing linux on my laptop, never changed ever since.
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Thanks for the great summary @briannaljohns and @dusjagr. 
I’ll add that @dusjagr shared an open source tool called HOTGLUE. It is ostensibly a code-less way to quickly whip up a website, but it acts as a big canvas on which you can stick and/or embed almost anything you want. IMO this thing’s wild.
@dusjagr shared a couple links to sites created with HOTGLUE here and here. But there are more crazy examples of its use here. @dusjagr has used this for facilitating workshops and creating online zines.
Might be something useful for activities at GOSH Global Gatherings or regional events.
I also appreciate the chat about passing on knowledge, and hope this is a conversation we can continue in the knowledge thread.
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Hi everyone! The next open-source apps meeting is coming up soon - it will be March 3rd at 21:00 UTC. We will be taking a look at Limesurvey, to see if it can be a potential tool for the upcoming election reflection 
This meeting is on the GOSH community calendar and we will meet via this Jitsi link!
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Sorry I couldn’t make this meeting, but consolidating what I heard afterwards, here are some fully open source survey tools we’ve identified:
- SurveyStack by @gbathree’s team
- EUSurvey
- Framaforms
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Just wanted to chime in and say that miraheze.org hosts free mediawiki for open projects (they host the Counter Culture Labs wiki) and I believe both Digital Ocean and Linode will give free hosting for U.S. non-profits
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That’s really cool @juul! Thanks for sharing this information. Do you manage the Counter Culture Labs wiki? How’s the hosting experience with miraheze.org like? Great to know this resource.
@briannaljohns isn’t GOSH using Digital Ocean right now for hosting? Is GOSH already on their non-profit plan?
On that note, I just stumbled upon this page saying Flickr might provide discounted accounts for non-profits. Maybe something to consider… Sadly Flickr itself isn’t open source, but they have historically been supportive of free culture and was one of the first online services to implement Creative Commons licensing options.
Hey @hpy! Do you have any more info on the non-profit plan for Digital Ocean? GOSH isn’t on it at the moment and I can’t find any information on it from a quick web search.
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Hi all! The open source applications for GOSH meetings are supposed to happen on the first Thursday of every month, but there was a scheduling issue with the April meeting, and it will actually be on Thursday March 31st at 21:00 UTC. The meeting is on the GOSH community calendar and we will be meeting via this Jitsi link!
If you have anything in particular you’d like to discuss at the meeting, feel free to mention it in this forum thread. I know @hpy and I are interested in open source tools for “digital gardening” (check out this post for a great explanation of digital gardening by @hpy) so that can be a topic for discussing at the meeting.
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I haven’t used their services so I can’t personally vouch, but I just learned about May First Coop at mozfest a couple of weeks ago. They provide hosting for multiple open-source services (e.g., webmail, webhosting, nextcloud, etc.) for social movements and their prices seem reasonable. Might be an interesting option if we want to “outsource” admin of these types of services to another organization that is aligned with many of our community’s values.
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Hi everyone,
I am providing a quick summary of today’s open-source applications for GOSH meeting!
I was joined by @hpy, and we discussed the change in Gitlab’s free-of-charge tier and how that impacts GOSH - since GOSH is registered as part of the Gitlab open source program, we should be OK for now. We also briefly chatted about finding tools to do “digital gardening” for GOSH, but agreed it may be better to revisit this when there is more interest in digital gardening from the community.
We also realized that most of the needs we identified earlier for GOSH have been met!
- Surveys → SurveyStack and EUSurvey
- Polls → built-in discourse function
- Scheduling (i.e. finding a time for a meeting) → crabfit
- Newsletter → Mautic
- Video conferencing → Jitsi
The only need we are still waiting on is the Google Docs replacement, which will likely be Nextcloud. @hpy is currently talking to folks from open source ecology to see if we can join their instance for free! If not, we have this nextcloud option that @dusjagr recommended, and another inexpensive one that @hpy found.
These meetings are regularly scheduled for the first Thursday of each month (the next one is scheduled for May 5) - but it looks like most of the work we’ve needed to get done is close to being finished. Because of that, do you all still see a need to have these meetings? Should we still leave them open on a monthly basis, or do you think we are at an okay point to wrap them up?
Curious to hear what you think!
-Bri
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Miraheze have been very professional. They have a proper support system with tickets and responses have been prompt. They do require that the wiki is actively used (I think their policy is there must be at least one edit per 30 days) but it is not well enforced, they give plenty of warning in advance and you can always talk to them.
I don’t think GOSH should be using any non-open software for its operations. I’m kinda surprised that isn’t already an established GOSH policy.
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The only need we are still waiting on is the Google Docs replacement, which will likely be Nextcloud.
Honestly WYSIWYG text editing is, and always has been, a mistake, unless you’re talking about professional typesetting. Google docs is a horrible resource hog on everything but chrome and formatting is a pain. Our community’s solution has always been to only use plain text for editing and encourage basic mediawiki formatting so we can use live editing during e.g. meetings for notes and then paste the documents into our wiki for long term collaboration.
I highly recommend: https://pad.riseup.net/
I have also used GitHub - hackmdio/codimd: CodiMD - Realtime collaborative markdown notes on all platforms. before and liked it but didn’t spend much time on it. The bad thing about that one is that it forced markdown formatting which may not be compatible with whatever wiki/forum people use.
Hei Marc @juul
Don’t you think that nextcloud, being an open source software, exactly solves those issues?
easy to use for those wysiwyg fanatics onboarding from whereever they come from?
collabroative pads in .md? and local copies as “real” files if needed for backup and long term storage.
our discussion was, how to convince those gdocs maniacs into another platform.
so they won’t stick to it for “practical” reasons or just cos they are used to it.
Hi all! I see on the GOSH calendar that there is another open source applications meeting scheduled for Friday May 5 at 10pm UTC.
Based on this previous post, it seems like we no longer need monthly meetings on open-source applications for GOSH. I can remove these meetings from the GOSH calendar later this week, but if you would like to keep them, let me know before Thursday, May 4th.
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