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

Tue Jun 12 03:26:27 PDT 2018

I agree entirely (as you know) Michiel. Is there a useful directory /
information resource you use that might help people adopt, use, develop
and interact with such tools, apps, environments? I should add a
resource to the local chapter site  or at least point to useful one's.

One of the issues I've found is that people are not aware of tools,
applications and services that are open, secure, privacy respecting and
convenient. Once they find them often they aren't able to effectively
evaluate them. Even if they like them after evaluation they run into the
negative side of network effects where their social graphs on closed
platforms are a dead weight that hinders these "better" apps etc from
reaching a critical mass.

As you imply one thing this community or rather the various communities
that interact here can do is be part of establishing critical mass of
adoption of tools that don't prey on users.

I hope the nl chapter tools project gets the support it deserves. There
is plenty of scope to engage and extend the toolset and data services
you are working on,  even if a chapter does not use the WP theme
template etc. But it would be a huge mistake to judge the nl project in
such narrow terms. The important bits are the things you talk about and
this is where I'd like to see support increase for developers to engage. 

Maybe we could collectively identify some nice to have services that
tools lack compared to closed environments and setup code sprints to
work on making them even better?

best

Christian

Michiel Leenaars wrote:
> 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 
>
> Internet Society Nederland  -------- Telefoon +31 (0)70 314 0385
> Prins Willem-Alexanderhof 5 -------- Mobiel: +31 6 27 050947
> 2595 BE Den Haag ------------------- SIP: michiel at isoc.nl
> https://isoc.nl -------------------- 
> _______________________________________________
> As an Internet Society Chapter Officer you are automatically subscribed
> to this list, which is regularly synchronized with the Internet Society
> Chapter Portal (AMS): https://portal.isoc.org

-- 
Christian de Larrinaga
@ FirstHand
-------------------------
+44 7989 386778
cdel at firsthand.net