[Chapter-delegates] Google for Non Profits - I think not

[Eric Burger]

I am not an apologist for Google. To be clear, they have been very supportive of the Internet Society and for that we thank them. However, their business model follows the NSA mantra (“We don’t read your email because we don’t have humans reading it”) and they do have to follow local laws in places where the laws may not align with the Internet Society’s principals (USA - we can read anything with (or sometimes without) a subpoena; EU - we can change history and censor content we don’t like; North Asian Countries - you have to have servers in country so we can read anything without a subpoena; etc.). As such, I’ve been part of campaigns in other organizations to extract from using their HOSTED services.

The reason for my message is the shouted HOSTED. There are lots of FLOSS tools for group collaboration available. The problem is not creating the software. The problem is running it somewhere. What we get from Google is global access to platforms that for all intents an purposes never fail and have infinite capacity. That is something that is hard to replicate, more especially for free.

Because of that issue, there are some p2p group collaboration tools floating about. The problem there is potentially running afoul of local laws, either on purpose (i.e., you know the network will be placing encrypted materials on your node, and encryption is illegal in your country) or inadvertently (i.e., your node happens to get the piece of data that has a statement that your government has deemed illegal (like child pornography, or more likely statements that may be interpreted as against the interests of the state)).


> On Jul 5, 2015, at 9:13 AM, Satish Babu <sb at inapp.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi Gihan
> We at ISOC-TRV will be happy to join the initiative (if another chapter wants to take the lead), or lead it ourselves. We have reasonable Open Source skills available in our part of the world. Besides, my day job involves heading the International Centre for Free and Open Source Software (ICFOSS), a not-for-profit mandated with the promotion of Open Source.
> 
> Of course, this would be a non-trivial effort, and one way may be to adopt/adapt an existing open source product if something exists.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> satish
> 
> 
> On Sun, Jul 5, 2015 at 8:54 AM, Gihan Dias <gihan at uom.lk> wrote:
> On 15/07/04 12:54 AM, Marcin Cieslak wrote:
> I'd rather support the development of open-source tools that can
> be deployed anywhere. I know, not that fancy.
> I would, too.
> Who wants to start on such a toolkit for chapters?
> 
> Gihan
> ISoc-LK
> 
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