This seareas of workshops outreaching #activitypub to the European Union might be interesting to discuss. As they embed a future of Europe based on #openweb tools that could be seen as cooperative approach based on the fediverse.
There are video embeds here, but they are being blocked, how to get peertube embeds to work?
The is a long open thried preparing for this Webinar with the European Commission and AP Community - Meeting - SocialHub
The domain(s) need to be whitelisted, see this thread, post a list of the domains and this can be done for you.
I’ve added your domain to the list of domains from which iframe embeds are allowed.
The is a long open thried preparing for this Webinar with the European Commission and AP Community - Meeting - SocialHub
Am interested in peoples thinking/feelings about pushing #openweb tech into such a Eurocratic institution. In the presentations you can really feel that they won’t it, they know that they need it.
BUT they have no idea what it is and how it works.
The is likely a space for more structured cooperatives to interface with this process.
Totally agree. At Autonomic we’re working with an art collective to run a Peertube instance and try to navigate how to understand it, what it is doing, how it interacts with other systems etc. There is a LOT of ground to cover in terms of training. It’s all very early days for the software but it is well built I would say.
I was always hopefuly that intiatives like CoTech, LibreHosters and CHATONS would be doing this but I didn’t see the level of organisation boiling up to a point where we coordinate publicly as a federation in a such a way as, say, Framasoft are doing - dedicated focus and funding for educational material, co-learning and campaigning for raising awareness alongside the necessary technical work.
Not to take away from the amazing wonderful amazingess that is Humans of CoTech of course 
It’s a good option for coops as the Eurocrats will have much easer time talking to them than the “cats” on the fedivers who they are talking to now.
At the #OMN we are a globe “disorganization” that runs 8 or 9 #openweb instances for public use #4opens some are going very well, happy with the #peertube https://visionon.tv at mo.
I attended the second webinar and found it rewarding, in particular spritely looks really cool (but made me aware of a split between ActivityPub and Solid around permissions systems). I also especially liked the points raised regarding ActivityPub != Mastodon
I got the impression that the EU is interested in GDPR and breaking up tech monopoly, which obviously aligns with the co-operative movement. There was some discussion about an organised body for SocialHub which we’ve talked about. In my opinion something more formalised would be effective for communication between ActivityPub and the EU
Also: I already suggested a bunch of times that the SocialHub body could be a co-operative
+1. Some of the co-ops and people on this forum are working on semantic web projects, but CoTech as a whole doesn’t have any kind of co-ordination around ActivityPub or the semantic web
@decentral1se what do you think would be a good first step that will bring us closer to the level of organisation you’re talking about? Maybe we could set up a circle/group about the topic, a bit like the Infrastructure working group?
Am I understanding correctly that the dream is specifically better organisation around the goal of re-decentralising the web?
I am more referring to discoverability here.
Here we go…
A lot of people don’t know CoTech exists. A lot of people don’t know what Co-operatives are. A lot of people don’t know that Technology Co-operatives are possible. If they do they hardly know what we do.
There is so much awareness raising to be done. Then once people know we exist, then we need to have a place to match what they want with what we offer (e.g. I want a shared hosting, what co-op does that). Then once you have that, you need each co-op to have clear documentation: where are the servers, what is the GDPR thing, do you do backups, etc. etc. etc. We need to account for individuals and institutions who have vastly different needs.
We are all banging away at getting our own co-op websites up to speed with this info but we could be coordinating this. Look at what Welcome to the CHATONS website | CHATONS are doing (a “chaton” is a hosting provider):
In Librehosters, we tried to define a data spec to list some things that a collective should say about itself and then load that into a common website so that people could have ease of discovery. See librehosters / librehost api · GitLab.
These are all good attempts but I don’t they’ve gotten far enough. Both CHATONS and Librehosters have faced internal organising issues which led to a lot of stagnation as far as I understand. Maybe we’re the same!
Another example: look at this tweet that we found recently https://twitter.com/jackyalcine/status/1395075948601479170?s=03:
This person sent us a mail shortly after saying “yeah that sounds great but I have no idea how to actually get a shared hosting from you”. That’s on us to fix.
So yeah, back to bread & butter co-operative propagandising is what I am talking about. But not without backing that up with clear information, sign up flows, the full “I want a thing” to “I have a thing” pipeline for people in search of technology done by not megacorps.
Who wants to start the CoTech Propaganda Work Group?
One idea: one way to get started on the above is maybe unblock the discussion around working/fixing/designing our own CoTech website? If we can concretise the need in a proposal and present it for the Fund then we could make it happen? From there we can present each co-op a way to structure info about themselves that can be plugged into the website? This is already happening kinda but could be improved. Down to think through this with someone if interested? (apologies for going heavily Off Topic and slighty ranty :))
Personally I think that propaganda sounds like a basic day-to-day function of CoTech
The idea of connecting clients to CoTech based on services sounds like marketing (I’m not saying this as a negative). I found this old thread from 2018 about marketing (bidding for projects as CoTech) and this stack of slides for marketing CoTech to clients, but I don’t know where those conversations went. I think that there was one project which some co-ops made a bid for as CoTech and otherwise haven’t done
In terms of advocating the starting and supporting of new co-ops, I think that there are quite a lot of organisations set up for this already? Likewise Coop Cloud looks really cool but I think it’s something CoTech could support, maybe fund, but not replace. Were you thinking of proposing/scoping a service for people to find coops that meet their needs more generally?
I suppose the element where CoTech and propaganda mostly intersect is in the CoTech newsletters, right? I had brought up a while back about extending the readership of the newsletters to a wider audience, but a lot of people preferred to keep it as internal to CoTech for now. Generally speaking I guess better than “marketing/advertising” of traditional companies we could look to other ways of producing content and maybe interactive content to spread co-operative ideas. Here’s a fun example: The Evolution of Trust
Loosely related, I like the IWW imagery. Using the Uber Eats and Deliveroo strikes as a context, I took this as an excuse to finish and publish a blog post that I’d started writing: Couriers Strikes, Unions and Co-Operatives. The post features @KingMob 's project Wobbly which is designed to help organise decentralised unions, and CoopCycle, which is a federation of courier co-ops mostly from Europe. The TLDR is that I’m suggesting that there’s crossover between class war, unionised workers and co-operatives, and finally that these kind of tools can be made into semantic web applications particularly for interoperability. I kept the post quite short (I might come back to it later), but I’m very interested in where we could go with that, what kind of things we could do, what kind of spaces we could create to help with it
Discussions about the CoTech website, marketing and soforth might be better on a different thread than this one?
What specific discussion do you think is blocked?
My understanding is that the primary issue is a lack of volunteers to update the existing site or address the outstanding issues, I do some work on it every now and then, for example for the CoTech spring break I contacted all the co-ops that are members but not listed and asked them to supply graphics and copy for the site if they didn’t want to update it themselves but only one responded and then nobody apart from @SzczepanOfAnimorph and @Hannah turned up for the session on it and we didn’t get much done.
There’s nothing to stop other people reading the newsletter at the moment is there? We should fix that if so!
I’ve added all of these things as an agenda item for the next call. I split it into sub-ideas, did I miss anything?
Discussions about the CoTech website, marketing and soforth might be better on a different thread than this one?
Sorry! I have been including my points about semantic web tools, that part is at least relevant to ActivityPub, but I appreciate that the bulk of it isn’t 
I can start new thread(s) after we can discuss it in the call if that’s alright?
There’s nothing to stop other people reading the newsletter at the moment is there?
There’s not but I brought it up when I was asking about the audience we were writing for and the conclusion in that call was “CoTech”
What specific discussion do you think is blocked?
I’m not sure if this is the one which @decentral1se means but there’s this thread about revamping the website: Updating the CoTech website
Ah yeah nothing specific, I guess, just a gut feeling. There was talk about migrating the site at one point but that didn’t get too far and that was because there was discussion about whether the current tech of the site is suitable now that the original devs aren’t around etc. Then there was also some talk about the purpose of the site and I think that could do with some clarifying (re: the points above).
Thanks for your work on the site! I also sent a few PRs but ran out of steam on it…
A few of us at Go Free Range did a bit of work to use a static site generator (Jekyll) to generate the site. We’re still around. Happy to help! The build process is all automated so it’s “just” markdown, and CSS really - bit of HTML templating if you need to make some radical changes. Jekyll is what github pages uses, so it’s not too out-there technology wise. But it’s not wordpress, for example. For better or worse. I’m not sure the technology is what’s slowed things down.
Raises hand
