Open source and self-hosted apps for GOSH

General
54

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.

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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.

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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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Ooops I didn’t see the May 5 meeting at all, sorry.

Before I forget just FYI for everyone, there’s a group called CommunityBridge which apparently helps people host BigBlueButton meetings on what looks like a case-by-case basis:

https://communitybridge.com/hosting/

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Hi all!

I wanted to share another open-source tool of use to GOSH, it’s called Singlelink and it’s an open-source alternative to linktr.ee for building “microsites.”

I’ve just made one for GOSH to be used on our social media channels, you can check it out here. I figured it would be best to share this information here so that we can keep track of it in the future :slight_smile:

That’s all for now!
-Bri

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60

Oooooh, nice find! :hearts: Super glad there’s an open source replacement for linktr.ee. Thanks @briannaljohns!

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61

cross posting on suggestion of @hpy →

This is a little off-course but seeing commons booking, wanted to share this also (my neighbor is the maintainer, and we use it in our cohousing community) –

Gather

Gather

The App for Community

It’s basically a way to manage meals, things, spaces, and shared stuff within a community. Built in Ruby on a modern framework, and (knowing Tom) probably well organized and documented code.

We use it for all our meals and our whole work system (which is quite complex), as do the two neighboring communities. @nanocastro maybe useful for you guys if you have a community. Fully open source, host yourself or use the hosted version.

Probably the most underappreciated code I know of

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62

Quick thought that - in addition to the other things we’ve discussed in this thread - we should ideally also pay for the GOSH Flickr account and use it as a place for all our photos and videos, unless we can find a fully open source replacement that includes the same functionality.

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Translation came up in the Panama Gathering onboarding call today. One 100% open source tool is LibreTranslate (GitHub repository). Just putting it here for the record.

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Another note in response to some conversations we had at GOSH 2022 in Panama, i.e. Big Tech-free email providers.

This is a difficult and complicated topic, AFAIK there are no “perfect” options that :ballot_box_with_check: tick all of these boxes: fully open source stack; good privacy; low/zero cost; and not based in a 14 Eyes country which has spying & surveillance agreements with the US.

But FWIW, these are some I am aware of which are relatively much better than Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc.:

  • Posteo - Supportive of and uses lots of open source software in its infrastructure; runs on 100% renewable energy; based on Germany (with the pros and cons that come with it); starts at EUR 1 per month and can pay anonymously with physical cash. I use this.
  • Migadu - Good privacy reputation; dedication to avoiding vendor lock-in; based in Switzerland; requires you to bring your own custom domain (i.e. they don’t provide *@migadu.com email addresses) which can be a good thing; starts at USD 19 per year. I appreciate that they have a very honest pros and cons page.
  • Disroot - A non-profit collective (cooperative?) based in the Netherlands; exclusively uses 100% open source software and contributes code to the community (the only email service I know of that does this); custom domain possible; starts at EUR 0; their organisation is fairly new and IMO not super stable yet. I have an account here.
  • SDF Public Access UNIX System - 99% open source; 30+ years old non-profit tech collective based in the US, generous storage for USD 36 per year with email + Nextcloud + lots of nerdy tools. However, the sign up and set up process is also 30+ years old and involves lots of archaic commands in a terminal through an SSH connection. If you don’t know what that means, then it’s a very high learning curve! Completely run by volunteers, and there are occasional outages.
  • Mailbox.org - Also runs on certified renewable energy; some paid plans comes with a Nextcloud account; custom domain possible; based in Germany; starts at EUR 1 per month. This might be useful when if the GOSH community eventually decides to get its own Nextcloud instance.
  • Tutanota - Mostly open source; emphasises privacy features; starts at EUR 0; but some features are not compatible with general email clients, you have to either use their webmail or their open source email app. I think they’re based in Germany. Allows custom domains.
  • Protonmail - This is a famous one which has privacy as their key selling point. However, their software stack is more closed source, and they use non-standard email protocols, meaning you have to use their apps to access email. Based in Switzerland (?). They also have a “bridge” app that can link their email to generic clients like Thunderbird or Outlook or Apple Mail, but I heard it’s unreliable. Allows custom domains.

The above are not specific recommendations, and each has their own set of possible problems. What is best for you depends on your values and priorities (e.g. runs on renewable energy? fully open source? physical location of servers? how much privacy do you really need? anonymous cash payments?). But IMO all are much much more socially and environmentally responsible than Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc. There’s simply no comparison. Recently I’ve been vaguely hearing good things about Fastmail, but I haven’t studied this option yet.

There are other recommendations in this guide and this guide.

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65

Hello everyone!

I wanted to add to this thread that Cal.com (open source appointment scheduling software), has just released v2.4 and it includes a lot more features than before - including availability dates override!

Just thought that this would be useful to share on this thread, I’ve tested it out a bit and all works great!

Thanks,
Bri

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66

Hi all!

Does anyone know of open source replacements to Eventbrite? I’ve tried pretix but found it very difficult to use. If you know of any, please let me know!

Bri

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@briannaljohns: @mariob is the co-founder of Eventyay which is a fully open source replacement for Eventbrite. Of course, they are also the co-founder of FOSSAsia so they use that platform for registration which you can see here for the 2023 summit.

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BigBlueButton has previously been mentioned as a fully open source videoconferencing platform. I previously posted an instance called CommunityBridge, and looks like it is now open to everyone to use!

BTW and FYI, CommunityBridge is provided by a co-op called Agaric, which provides digital consulting services and fully open source software solutions to organisations.

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69

Oh and there’s another co-op that hosts a BigBlueButton instance here called meet.coop:

There is a subscription fee, but what might be really useful is that you can pay them to set up big meetings (up to 200 participants). So, if you’re running an online conference, you can pay meet.coop to host, admin, and manage all of it for you!

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70

And here are a couple new-ish open source form/survey tools:

They are in addition to EUSurvey which has been discussed before.

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Linking to this thread about open source calendar solutions started by @pte:

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Has anyone used loomio? It looks really neat and custom tailored to democratic decision making https://www.loomio.com/

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I use Loomio for decision-making with social.coop, a cooperative for hosting Fediverse/Mastodon servers. It is very useful when in need of a representative decision or quick opinion of the community: You can see who is allowed to vote and until when, there are options available (yes, no, absent, …) and you can comment alternatives or additions to the proposals below. It is complicated when one is using threads besides specific polls, because it can get out of hand, if there is no one summing things to switch to a decision. One might use a forum like this one (Discourse) instead.

There are some similar tools as well, I always wanted to try: Consider.it and Consul.

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