Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Community Communications Systems [was Equal Access [was Dropbox Limit Solution

[Henning Mortensen (hmortensen]

Thank you for your comments and suggestions. I have myself thought that
there should be a way where all of us techies can work together to provide
a service for all. I know that there are some good folks that have created
Gather and I understand that they need to charge for it in order to pay for
the development.

I can't help but think that if a group of techies set up a server in the
cloud that they could host many instances of the tools that communities
use. There would be a suite of services such as nextcloud and wordpress
that the tech-group would support and help communities with.  NextCloud
encrypts the data so there would be no leakage of data from one instance to
another. The tech-group would make sure the system is patched and backed up
but a large part would be creating user guides and how-to's about how the
systems work. I anticipate that it would cost about $500/yr to rent the
machines, buy a domain name and pay for storage. If this were divided by
100 communities it would only be $5/yr. If communities wanted, we could
increase that a little bit and hire a professional writer to do the user
guides. Techies have problems making them user friendly. The techies would
help developing content but the final wording goes to the writer.

Having a group of people that work together on this solves the biggest
problem of all. The dual problem of some communities not having resources
and other communities relying on a single person. In my community, we have
created an ITTeam, so that I am not the only person that knows what is
going on. Unfortunately, this does not really work as it just means I have
to try and explain things twice, and it doesn't take the pressure off for
me being available to fix things when they break. (thankfully very
rarely).  By creating a team of techies, we remove the pressure on all of
them. Instead of worrying about being away, they can just make sure that
there is always coverage.

See, you get me talking about this stuff and I find it difficult to stop.
There is always one more thing to say.
I hope that this idea of a tech group is something that catches on, even if
we don't host apps, it would be helpful to have coverage when we are away.

Henning

ps. I have subscribed to the groups.io list





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