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

Tue Jun 12 09:49:05 PDT 2018

Hi Michel,

I really appreciate you efforts to bring open, standard compliant, useful tools to our attention  so that we use them. I will definitely try them. 

And I also support the project - I believe it is worth trying to have some suite of tools. ( WP theme and E-mail support as well )

On the other hand for me and many my colleagues ease of use and minimization of efforts to learn something new is probably the most important criteria. We have our comfort zones and in most cases are too busy to try something new. 
I also feel that there is some disconnect between you Toolkit project and corporate tools used by ISOC HQ.  In my opinion there should more coordination and even cooperation here. 

And though I of course support open source movement I better not get into discussion - I primarily use MS Office and other commercial tools :) 

BR,

Sandro

-----Original Message-----
From: Michiel Leenaars [mailto:Michiel at staff.isoc.nl] 
Sent: Tuesday, June 12, 2018 1:38 PM
To: Sandro Karumidze <sandro_karumidze at hotmail.com>
Cc: Alexander Blom <alexander.blom at budgetphone.nl>; Chapter Delegates <chapter-delegates at elists.isoc.org>
Subject: Re: [Chapter-delegates] Chapter Toolkit needs just a few more supporting chapters before tuesday...

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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