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

[Michiel Leenaars]

Hi Christian,

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

thanks for the support. There is not really such a consolidated
resource; while there are quite big lists of tools that can be
self-hosted like:

     https://prism-break.org
     https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-selfhosted
     https://selfhostedweb.org/
     https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/

And on the other hand there are procotol centric lists like

     https://xmpp.org/software/
     https://webrtc.org/start/
     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_WebDav_software
     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_CalDAV_and_CardDAV_implementations

But finding out the intersection of tools and services - that are
useful, self-hosted, deployable and standards-compliant - takes up
significant time. And setting them up is quite some technical work
which rules out most 'normal' users. As you rightly state, meanwhile,
for most people someone will have forced some commercial service on
them. And once you've clicked past the Terms of Service it is easy to
forget that the data lives on someone elses computer, and the onus is
on the better solution to overcome the inertia and network effects.

Our stated end goal is to make it almost trivial for the larger
community to join forces and maintain this kind of work.

CDL> nl project in such narrow terms. The important bits are the things
CDL> you talk about and this is where I'd like to see support increase
CDL> for developers to engage. 

Obviously, we have big but very concrete (and we believe well-thought
out and realistic) plans. However, the minimum of funding we are
asking is the crucial factor to make it happen. From the chapter side we
are all unpaid volunteers, like all of you, and spend significant
time. Since what we do is very thorough, we do need external real
developer effort to make the whole system work and behave as we
believe. 

Taking back the internet as an open platform will not happen by
itself, unfortunately. The ISOC community is in a great position to
help make it happen nonetheless.

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

Certainly, that would be a great idea. For now, obviously, our goals is
to create a first iteration - to have something for people to tune
into. But it would be great to do a chapter meetup in front of say
FOSDEM in Brussels - and then immerse a delegation into the 8000 open
source developers and hundreds of projects that attend that event. I
would also love to see an "ISOC Summer of the Net" where
computer science students can work on such projects with IETF/ISOC
mentors over the summer holiday with a stipend.

Of course, this all requires budget. So we hope to prove the value step
by step, because at this point the speed at which we can move really is
mostly financially restricted.

Best,
Michiel