Online assembly

Co-ops International Solidarity
#1

Hi,

I’m Vitor Mattos, head of Lyseon Tech, we are a technology cooperative in Rio de Janeiro - Brazil focused on solutions with free software license: implementation, customization, development, training and consulting.

I met you on the internet and we already use services from Media Blaze Hosts because we believe that cooperatives should do business with cooperatives.

We are about to start offering online assembly to cooperatives here in Rio de Janeiro with votes, minutes and all legal requirements:

  • NextCloud:
    authentication of registered users, term of use, OnlyOffice for minutes
  • Jitsi:
    Location for audio and video meetings, recording of the meeting in a folder accessible on NextCloud, restricted access to Jitsi with integration with NextCloud via LDAP
  • Voting:
    We have not yet concluded, the NextCloud Pool tool does not solve what is needed for an assembly. We thought about putting integration with Telegram and using the Telegram pool bot or integrating with rocket.chat using rocket.chat pool bot

How have you been doing online assemblies of your cooperatives with voting, minutes and legal requirements?

Cooperative greetings!

7 Likes
#2

This is very interesting, as I have just seen proposed changes in rules governance, to include ‘electronic ballot’ in the worker coop think tank I am a member of.

I would love to know more about this!! I am reachable at +81 90 6523 2640 on Signal/Telegram/etc :smile:

1 Like
#3

Hi @vitormattos and @yasu

I’m member of coopdevs.org workers coop from Barcelona. We also provide FLOSS solutions to social economy companies :muscle:

As a result of COVID crisis a lot of catalan cooperatives needs to organize their annual assemblies (required by law) online.

We are creating a toolbox and we are working with:

  • Jitsi + broadcasting service
  • Decidim for voting

Some coops are starting to organize their assemblies with this stack, take a look of Som Energia assembly website assemblea.somenergia.coop will be this saturday

We are also developing vote delegation that it’s another legal requirement

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#4

That looks really interesting, how are you integrating Jitsi? I wonder if BigBlueButton could be integrated…

2 Likes
#5

Oi Vitor, bemvindo à CoTech!

Ce fala Portuguese né? Eu tambem falou, um pouco, pq minha esposa é da São Paulo. sou Ingles, eu trabalho com @Chris @Webarchitects https://www.webarchitects.coop/ em Sheffield, onde nos moramos, ao norte de Inglaterra. A co-operativa tem vingt anos, mais ou menos. Pessoalmente, eu trabalho com contabilidade, e o contato com nossos membros, etc. E trabalho como voluntário em promoção de co-operativas, aqui: https://www.principle5.coop/.

Sua pergunta e interessante, mas ainda estamos aprendendo sobre ‘assembleias online’ , em nossas co-operativas, no meu opinião.

Em Webarchitects agora, estamos trabalhando com outras co-operativas em outros païses , num projeto chamada o Online Meeting Co-operative , https://www.org.meet.coop/about.html usando open source software Big Blue Button . Isso é specificamente para reuniões grandes online, assembleias, educação, etc. Pode ser util? Meu colega Chris sabe tudo sobre isso, se quer falar com ele? (em Inglês só,mas seu Inglês parece bom.)

Você e o primeiro Brasileiro aqui no rede, eu acho. Bemvindo de novo. Sera bom te encontrar, um dia, se Deus quiser, e depois da pandemia.

Tchau :slight_smile:

2 Likes
#6

Very happy for all the interactions! :smiley:

Yasu, very good to see cooperatives on the other side of the world. Send news of how the assemblies are doing online.

@sseerrggii I already looking at Decidim and doing tests. Thanks for the tips! Did you customize the Jitsi frontend? It is very different in the videos on assemblea.somenergia.coop.

Chris, I will do the integration using LDAP.

@jonathan I hope that soon we can give you a big hug physically. Why BigBlueButton and not Jitsi? We are making an implementation of BigBlueButton for a client but this implementation will not be for voting, it will be for classes. This client expects to have 4000 class hours per month in a few months.

3 Likes
#7

Because it appears to be better in many ways, see the The Online Meeting Co-operative project and the forum and wiki for more details.

2 Likes
#8

What a wonderful :thread:, thank you for kickstarting it @vitormattos, great to hear your process too @sseerrggii!

As a user I can only confirm that Big Blue Button (BBB) is easy to operate, has great features (at Animorph we use screen sharing with collaborative real-time notes & drawing & diagrams) and, at least in the Meet.coop setup, is very robust (much more reliable experience I ever had with Jitsi). Last week the Open Co-op conference was handled without any issues with over 50 people on the call (please correct me if I’m wrong meet.coop crew).

The other week at Platform Co-op course @yasu mentioned it would be great to have as many international co-ops taking part in running meet.coop, not only for load-balancing reasons, but also because it’s easier to provide 24/7 support!

I would be really curious to find out whether BBB can be integrated with Decidim!

1 Like
#9

This looks like the best thread to post a BigBlueButton feature request to:

This is the Jitsi thread:

1 Like
#10

Sounds about right @chris, the deadline for proposals is the 21st of June and I’m not available this weekend. Anyone from Meet.coop got some steam? Or perhaps it’s possible to participate in the conversation via this thread past the deadline?

#11

Request posted to meet.coop:

2 Likes
#12

The meet.coop proposal looks interesting. We are doing a setup with BBB using Scalelite and implementing auto scale to control BBB instances in AWS.

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#13

Returning to the thread, we are developing an app for Nextcloud for online assembly.

Development is at an early stage but we have already assembled for 4 cooperatives.

Távola takes care of the voting part and at the moment the assembly room is in Jitsi.

2 Likes
#14

Hi! An update on our work with Decidim for Cooperatives governance

logo2

We published a guide (in Catalan) guia.cercles.coop with all the legal information (compliant with the Catalan law of cooperatives) and a functional guide of the use cases that we cover.

So far:

  • The Catalan Cooperative Confederation launched Cercles.Coop to share costs between cooperatives that want to use this technology (Cercles provides support, servers, maintenance, future development,…)
  • Legal advice
  • We developed plugins for Decidim that enable::
    • Vote delegation: enables delegated voting within Decidim Consultations
    • Census: with phone SMS verification, membership type, and vote weighing, and consultation results based on them.

Chekout guide.cercles.coop you will find the links to the github repositories developed. Also here you have a presentation with some screenshots.

We hope this can help other cooperatives around the world. Cercles.coop aims to continue improving these features and plugins. We believe that cooperative’s digital governance came to stay.

7 Likes
#15

Great stuff, thanks for sharing!

1 Like
#16

Mol be fet. Felicitats. Y moltes gràcies per compartir.

1 Like