Following a discussion with @Matt.Elder and @Jeff today, I was thinking again about what software is already out there that serves local communities. Matt is doing some great work here, with this forum, and I hope to help continue with it. I’m particularly interested in collaborations that link the software and the community aspects.
I mentioned Project Kamp, with a youtube channel and their associated software platform.
They are more oriented towards regenerative agriculture projects (based in Portugal), but they are building a community center, and will have to build up the social aspects as well. I think their software is mainly for coordinating working on projects together, brainstorming, and fundraising from a distributed global audience.
Of course, we use Mosaic, built by someone in cohousing. There is Gather.
There is the Circle Weaver, that works with a sociocratic model.
That’s all the tools I already know about specifically aimed at cohousing or intentional community. However, there are lots and lots of other kinds of things that we could use (or host) that might be useful to us. This forum is certainly an example; other examples that we might set up include:
A public wiki that anyone in Nyland could edit.
A chat system, like Slack or Discord.
Our own file-sharing and archival system, to have less dependence on Google Drive.
Question and Answer systems, like Stack Overflow and its peers.
A media server and network-attached storage device in the CH, so that we can locally stream and save media without straining the network connection.
There are also more tools than I could start listing for supporting community decision-making processes. Roughly, I suspect that looking for a single system that handles all of our community informational needs will likely work less well than combining a relatively small number of widely-used tools each designed to serve a much simpler function.
Of course, all-in-one system have their advantages too, and by no means do I think we’re should ignore them! But quite often they have numerous subtle disadvantages - increased complexity, relatively poor fit-to-use for each specific use they support, smaller user base and thus smaller development team (and thus more bugs), and usually lots of user-facing details that are irrelevant to the community’s actual usage patterns (which makes them harder to learn and understand).
Ok, after looking into that, I’d be kind of interested in at least trying out Mattermost and seeing how the fit might feel. I’ll note that getting something running, even self-hosted, is the easy step; it’s much harder to coordinate enough people to try something out, and even harder to inculcate general adaption.
As such, if there’s a few different things we’d like to try out, we could get together a crew of early testers who’d be willing to help try things together, kick the tires a bit, and see how we like it. (This seems like a lovely complement to talking to lots of people in order to elicit wants and needs for such software.)
So, to anyone reading this – if someone (likely me) is setting up tools for communication, and if there’s a small group or Nylanders trying out each tool, would you be interested in joining that group? What would you hope for us to try out?