WeAreFairphone Community Server (fairphone.community domain)

Fairphone owns https://fairphone.community as a domain. We’d like to use this domain as a place where the community can collaborate, work and experiment together.

There are many great ideas in the community for growing the movement for fair electronics, promoting Fairphone or create more awareness. We want to encourage people as much as possible to take up new ideas and try them and develop them. After all, this is how Fairphone itself started on a day not even so long ago.

We’re now in the very early stages of setting up a new server for the community to use to create new digital ideas and ways of collaboration that promote the values and goals of Fairphone.

Now my question to you is:

  • would a dedicated community server help the community?
  • how would you use such a server?
  • How would it be governed?
  • what services would you like to use?
  • would you like to be SysAdmin of such a server?
  • what hardware/software requirements do you think such a server should have?
  • what other questions should we ask?

I am really looking forward to the discussion and your ideas and hope we can collectively set a new step in developing the movement!

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Let’s collect our suggestions for possible services in this list. (It’s a wiki post! :smiley: )

##Suggestions

Note from @Stefan: I added the usernames of the people, who filled the list. That doesn’t necessarily mean that these people initially came up with the idea. They can however answer questions if something remains unclear about the topic.

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Maybe we could also share and upload pictures from events…

  • owncloud or nextcloud
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@maba007 what do you have in mind exactly? How would that look like? :slight_smile:

Something like that but not for eating. Fairphone users which need technical support can search for supporters near. Supporter can update their profile and availability. :slight_smile:

I like the idea… But do you know if software to do this already exists (Open source and self-hostable)?

@Douwe Not yet. I’ll ask my network and do some research. I think something like that, would be a huge benefit for fairphone users and supporters.

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Yes, @Stefan, @Esmee and me have similar plans. But our plans were more centralized. It would mean people can send us a message that they want to be a volunteer and we put them on the map. You’re idea is also nice that people are able to do it themselves. Of course this has a trade-off in that you can’t check how ‘good’ or trustworthy people are. But maybe that is not a bad thing (at start).

Please add you idea to Stefans post above (it’s a wiki) and let us know if you found any existing software we could use for this!

What would they enter as geographical reference? Their home address? I saw this more as local hubs: You have one common email address for all Fairphoners in a city / metropolitan region and if someone has a problem with their phone, they write to that address and a Fairphoner, who is available, responds. Otherwise the help-seeker has to contact 10 people because the first 9 weren’t available.

It’s a bit different to pizza delivery because you’d expect them to answer, if they want to make some money. This service would be voluntarily.

I added GNU Mailman above (next to mailservice). For example, I don’t live in Vienna, but can travel to Vienna and Wr. Neustadt and some other cities around. I simply subscribe to their respective mailing lists and can respond to support requests on demand. Basically everyone could do that, which would assure a low threshold for new volunteers. This approach would also be less centralized, as @Douwe pointed out above.

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Something like that. An OpenStreetMap based map. Only a city name as location.

That’s a really cool idea! :smiley:

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Something like this?

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Greate, exactly that! :slight_smile:

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For pictures and videos this open source solution:

http://www.resourcespace.com/developers

can be useful.

But pictures can also just live on the forum… no?

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Hey all,

I am reviving this topic as we can start with this as soon as we want. But before we start we need to make some decisions. We have some ideas on what we could do with such a server, but not yet on how we are going to do it…

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Hi Douwe,

If I’m not alone I can help administrating the server.

I would recommend:

  • OS: Linux e.g. Ubuntu Server 16.04 LTS
  • classic LAMP setup
  • Mailserver for *@fairphone.community adresses
  • software as suggested, but we should define a progress what software we are going to install. E.g. voting in the forum.

I guess the server should be a virtual machine? This would make things easier e.g. upgrading, backup and independency from hardware.

Who will be responsible for regular backups? Is this done by the hoster? This would be much easier for us.
Did you already decide where the server will be hosted? If not I can send you some “green” providers from Austria.

Greetings
Werner

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Can we implement a scheduling vote application on the new server? I’m thinking of something like dudle.

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Hi,

I think that should be possible. As far as I can see it requires only Ruby and enabled CGI:

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Thank you for your feedback so far! It looks like the map made by @Stefan and the idea of the corresponding email lists is the most tangible as a use case at the moment… correct?

Maybe we can start with that and then on a per-case basis look if we expand into deploying other tools?

I came up with four questions we need to ask ourselves before deploying a new tool:

What problem does the tool solve?

How does the Fairphone community improve when we use this tool? Do we get more independent? Are we more likely to reach our goals?

Who will maintain it? (updates and such)

Setting up a new app/tool is done quickly, but patches need to be applied and updates to be done. If you request a new tool, can you also take care of it?

Who will govern it? (think about use and access policy)

With great power comes great responsibility. Some tools, like Nextcloud, allow people to upload a lot of stuff. Are we prepared to be responsible for their stuff? Can the tool allow usage everyone? By invite only? Just a few?

How and when do we decide it is a success or a failure?

Nothing so sad as a wiki where the latest modification date is over a year ago… How do you determine if the tool serves a purpose and is worth keeping online?

What do you think? Are these some good questions? Do you have more?

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