2021 Technology Infrastructure and Services / Infraestructura y servicios tecnológicos

Tuesday, November 9, at 3:00 pm (America/New_York, 1.5 hours)

If you want to learn more about our current technology and services, help plan how to engage the movement in their development, and plan our future development, join us and meet the TIAS team. This meeting will produce about 6 - 8 priorities for the coming year.
Please add any questions or comments you have before or after the session here.


Martes, 9 de noviembre, a las 15:00 horas (América/Nueva_York, 1,5 horas)

Si quiere saber más sobre nuestra tecnología y servicios actuales, ayudar a planificar cómo involucrar al movimiento en su desarrollo, y planificar nuestro desarrollo futuro, únete a nosotrxs y conoce al equipo de TIAS. De esta reunión saldrán entre 6 y 8 prioridades para el próximo año. Puedes expresar dudas o comentarios tanto antes como después de la sesión en este hilo.

Please see our report to the Board of Directors about the TIAS program team.


Por favor revisa nuestro informe a la Junta Directiva sobre el equipo de programa TIAS.

H!

I am super excited to mention that my friends and I are moving towards creating ‘Solidarity Economy IT Systems’

In this proposed network, both the systems development and human networking will be fused and inseparable.

Infrastructure such as MayFirst’s will be a very important part of this! We are already experimenting with an XMPP bot service connected to @MayFirst.org


The current sketch (It’s really rough) of the idea :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes::grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes: is as follows:

By way of explaining the idea, I will use this example. In Japan, there are many Vera Napoli pizza restaurants. I have never been disappointed by any establishment with this certification. Bringing the same idea over to IT, what if we create ‘Solidarity Economy IT Network’? The participants will agree to certain values:

  • We will end the model if Producer and Consumer - all participants will be co-developers and co-users

  • All software in the network will be free software or open source. No black box service will be allowed

  • Where desired software does exist, registering ideas or specifications of required software is encouraged

  • Do not engage in “Premium” software model, where the concept of Free Software or Open Source is abused to manipulate users to adopt some technology and then later screw them with unfree licenses

  • Recognize the harm of information asymmetry and offer education, documentation, etc., without charging money

  • This network will facilitate development, cataloging and hosting of useful “in-house” software for all sorts of software to be used by participating organizations and individuals. Users are encouraged to make software public as much as possible

  • Customers ordering software will need to understand and agree that a portion of the bill will be spent for the overall Solidarity Economy IT systems development, when a user-specific component of the system will be developed

  • Software made public in the network will have visibility and continuous integration that runs against all such software. It will also be reviewed by the General Assembly of the network for overlapping features with other software so that projects can be urged to merge

  • Open Protocols will be preferred over complicated and opaque software implementations

  • Just like I like those Vera Napoli establishments, I hope participating software vendors, etc, will be preferred by the customers in the market :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

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Hi, this is a very interesting proposal. I hope it’s ok with you but I’ve moved your comment to this thread where I think it might be more relevant.

Should this kind of Solidarity Economy IT Network certification and rules be backed by a larger organization like US solidarity economy network https://ussen.org/ ?

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Hi!

No, I don’t mind at all and thank you! Yes, I am also thinking about talking to a few people I know :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

Time to come with a massive positive proposal in a form such as Solidarity Economy, rather than (well justified) criticism of Capitalism (we can just let it die on its own :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:).

Information Technology will be instrumental in this!!

Here are the notes from Today’s session. Many thanks to our facilitators and all of the members who participated. Lots of great insights here. Feel free to continue the discussion in this thread.


Aquí están las notas de la sesión de hoy. Muchas gracias a nuestrxs facilitadorxs y a toda la membresía que han participado. Hay muchas ideas interesantes. Siéntase libre de continuar la discusión en este hilo.

I noted that someone was discussing secure texting and wish to add how this relates to design justice for the poor and electromagnetically sensitive, as well as possibly softphone desktop ability.

Texting is required often for financial transactions online, but not everyone can afford a cellphone. Signal and other secure messaging services also require a cellphone, even if you can place Signal or something similar on the desktop later. As an aside, I also wonder how secure anything can be with a Google or Apple system instead of something with open code. Also, not sure if this can be prevented, but I’ve heard also that cellphone numbers are being hijacked to allow banking confirmation codes to be faked, such as here: How hackers are hijacking your cellphone account.

Secondly, access to wired desktop softphone and text messaging service is important for there is a subset of the population that is extremely sensitive to electromagnetic technology exposures, and there is research to show that these emissions are harmful for everyone so need to be curtailed (esp. pulsing rather than static fields) – you can search for example these medical sites: PHIREmedical dot org (Britain), Bioinitiative dot org, MDsafetech dot org (USA). This is an issue I have been working on because of my own sensitivity, as you can see at lasttreelaws.com/ma-legislation with a list of some Massachusetts legislation.

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To add a bit of additional context to the “texting” discussion that I was part of, someone else from the perspective of an organization-member of MayFirst said it could be beneficial to have some technology as part of the MayFirst stack that helped them message their member base (by SMS/MMS or other services) – not secure texting necessarily.

While I agree that some people only have computer access, many others only have cell phones but not desktop – so, regardless of security, SMS can be an effective way to keep a community connected.

A piece of software that I helped build for that end is Spoke. I guess I’ll put this message here, so if anyone wants to discuss it further, I’m happy to help. Besides Spoke, there’s RapidPro: https://rapidpro.github.io/rapidpro/, built for some other use-cases.

It’s not yet open-source, but I hear the folks at rapidresponse dot io might be working to open-source their work – that has texting capabilities but also community call-center management.

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Hola Jaime
¿Sería posible conocer el informe a la Junta Directiva? Esto es debido a que los vínculos no funcionan más.
Gracias y saludos
Enrique

Gracias erq, he actualizado el url.