[Chapter-delegates] Chapter Toolkit needs just a few more supporting chapters before tuesday...

[Michiel Leenaars]

Hi Sandro,

thanks for your message and your questions. Allow me to clarify some
more in addition to Alexanders comments. We feel that we as chapters
should lead by example, and support the internet and web standards the
IETF and W3C produce - as well as extend the ability for everyone to
build exciting new things without asking others for permission. If we
do not support IPv6, DNSSEC, etc - who else will? If we shout about
waving the flag, we should be willing to carry it too. 

Take these external service providers, just a sample from the ones you
mention and/or currently in use by ISOC - and check out how they
visibly fail to provide basic support for some of these standards:

https://internet.nl/site/zoomgrants.com/307155/
https://internet.nl/site/wetransfer.com/307151/
https://internet.nl/site/docs.google.com/307152/
https://internet.nl/site/forms.google.com/307153/
https://internet.nl/site/www.surveymonkey.com/307160/
https://internet.nl/site/new.livestream.com/307302/
https://internet.nl/site/mailchimp.com/307150/
https://internet.nl/mail/comms.isoc.org/120414/
https://internet.nl/site/connect.internetsociety.org/307159/

The global nature of the internet has a tendency to create 'winner takes
all' mechanisms in the marketplace. We want to make the point that
chapters (and indirectly the population of the internet) should be
empowered to deploy services themselves on their own turf. If I'm
discussing a topic related to the national security of my country with
the chapter board, I don't feel very comfortable doing that in a system
which I know stores that in plain text outside of my country and
jurisdiction - especially in the light of legislation like the CLOUD
act and other similar legislation around the world. I believe this is
the same for all chapters - we sometimes talk about important stuff.

Some of the applications we propose are actually technically (far) more
advanced than their counterparts. FileSender for instance is capable of
client-side encryption and can confidentially send files of any size -
even a 100Gb or 1Tb file, depending on the amount of hard disk your
server has. So your can send a huge 4K video from an event to you
without problems. This is simply not possible with WeTransfer.
Searx (which we have live at https://search.internetsociety.org) allows
many independent search mechanisms to be used, to avoid the filter
bubble. And Cryptpad is the only fully encrypted collaborative editor
I'm aware of where the person hosting the server is unable to read the
messages. Pol.is is used in Taiwan to support political dialogue with
some very interesting results. Signserver can help to get digital
signatures more widely spread, without becoming dependent on a third
party. And the best thing is: your members can reuse all (or some) of it
in their own organisations as much as they like, on a machine they can
run and protect themselves - because it is all 100% open source. All the
things they dislike about what Tim Berners-Lee in his recent Turing
Award lecture called todays internet dystopia do not hold: no tracking,
no monetisation, no central points of control, etc.

The Internet is for Everyone, as our motto goes. And to me, that means
not just expanding the spread of the internet in a passive, consumptive
way. Internet Society at the core of its mission should empower users to
grow and improve the internet and the web themselves at every possible
layer - the future is too long and the world is too big to allow
individual companies to monopolise any technology. We need to build
convenient mechanisms for people to invent and deploy new services on
the internet for their own use in a reliable and scalable way. There is
in fact already a lot of great software out there that is not
well-known to most people, and through the chapter toolkit we want to
make those - and the underlying smart deployment mechanism itself -
more widely available. 

Obviously, it is like a menu in a restaurant - not everything is likely
to be immediately useful for every chapter at every point in time. This
set is however based on needs that we think are common, and on
tools that are among the best of breed and would make sense. Since we
aim at common collaboration scenario's, there should be something in
there for most chapters and in fact most organisations. The idea is to
grow it, and be inclusive.

(BTW: If there are other open source tools you think would make sense,
we'd by the way love to hear. Or you can actually contribute them
yourself, because this is a very democratic, bottom up effort).

Best,
Michiel Leenaars
Directeur 

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