Open source and self-hosted apps for GOSH

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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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.

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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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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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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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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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:

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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