Cooperative cloud? CoBox - looking to interview other coops

Hi everyone, we (a bunch of people who have been working between tech/ cooperative movements and politics) have just started a new tech coop called CoBox.

We recently got some funding to develop a dat-based peer-to-peer filemanagement/ backup system for cooperatives with the intention of boosting, along with other projects like nextcloud, the development of cooperative cloud infrastructures.

We are in the process of interviewing other cooperatives to understand needs and possible collaborations better to feed into the development process - and would love to hear from you. The interviews take about 60-90 minutes and as we have some funding, we are offering a small €50 compensation for your time.

Could you help us with this and talk to us about your organisation, data management, privacy and backup processes? We are interested in finding out what is currently working / and what is a challenge/ and whether there is the need for something like CoBox / and how it might fit into existing workflows.

Look forward to hearing your responses!

Jaya and CoBox crew

http://cobox.cloud/
https://twitter.com/CoBoxCoop

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Thanks for posting @Jaya, great that you have some funding for research / development, are you wanting to interview co-ops who are already providing things like Nextcloud servers to other co-ops or just end users?

As far as I can tell a lot of tech co-ops use GSuite.

Is “dat-based” a NodeJS data format? I’ve not been able to find a specification / overview of what it is anywhere, perhaps I need to spend sometime looking at the code in your GitHub repos? I’m having a read of the documentation at https://www.datprotocol.com/

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@Jaya Heya, we’d be really up for this. Our co-op is https://autonomic.zone/

I personally would love to see us using P2P technology but we currently don’t really use any. I’m a Scuttlebutt and DAT user already but I don’t think anyone else in the co-op is.

Feel free to get in touch: helo at autonomic.zone

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Happy to chat, we mainly provide Nextcloud but happy to look into new and exciting projects

lmacleod[at]mediablazehosts.coop

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@Jaya

Happy to have a conversation.

alex at commonknowledge dot coop

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Hi @Jaya,

I’m happy to have a chat about how we do data management and backups at Agile Collective and what else we can be doing.

stephen at agile dot coop

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This 30 minute talk looks like it should be a good technical overview of Dat, I haven’t watched it all yet:

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fwiw hypha.coop has a few scuttlebutt users :slight_smile: (mostly @laubenedict and @dcwalk_, and me a little bit)

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Hi @Jaya I am from hypha.coop and also co-organizer of DWeb Camp 2019. During my work with the Internet Archive I made note of all the tools that were used, and had discussions with co-organizers about pros and cons of open-source alternatives. In August I am also planning to draft a recommendation for moving the mostly closed source tools to a better futures with self-hosted / p2p tools. Even though the conference is not a co-operative, I think there are enough shared intentions that make these good use cases for CoBox.

Other things I am involved in that may be relevant:

  • IPFS live streaming + media archive workflow for Our Networks
  • Aether – free, privacy-sensitive public communities
  • Matrix provisioning for Toronto Mesh

The easiest way to discuss this would be when CoBox comes to Toronto this September for Our Networks!

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We are interested in interviewing both co-ops that provide tech services, like hosting and other support - as well as co-ops and small groups and organisations that have no in house sys admin and little-to-no tech capacity and therefore easily end up relying on corporate services like google docs/drive - often despite their best intentions.

The aim of the interviews is to on the one hand find out where and how CoBox fits into and supports existing co-op tech service providers, and on the other to find out the needs, pressures and work flows of small, resource strapped co-ops.

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This is great stuff! Many thanks - and looking forward to connecting in Toronto! We should hopefully even have a bit of a prototype to run by you at that point.

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Great, in that case I’m be happy to be interviewed on behalf of Webarchitects, chris@webarchitects.co.uk.

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great! sent you an email…

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I’ve already said on Twitter I’m up for this (and was who suggested you post on this forum) but reiterating that here too for food measure :grin:

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We would also be happy to contribute an Interview. We are the IT-Kollektiv from germany. We spent a lot of afford in building up a dezentralized intercoop collaboration infrastructure.

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Hi Liam - emailed you but looks like you are way on holiday?

Do get in touch if you are around and have a moment in the next week or so: jaya at blockades dot org.

Hi @Jaya,
I’m part of a small coop (8 people) from Caracas Venezuela.
We decided a few years ago to ditch GSuite for a local Synology server and services, but for different reasons we were forced this year to go back to G :frowning:.
I don’t have a technical background but could give you some user feedback. I’m at hola@mecha.pro

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@Zerp you introduce yourself on the forum if you haven’t already. Awesome to hear from a co-op in Venezuela! :smiley:

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