Reviewing the options below, can you speak to what solutions your own organization or the organizations that you work with in the Global South use to address these needs? Are there solutions that are particularly well-suited that we should be looking into? Are there solutions that we should avoid? And, if so, why?
To date, Beautiful Trouble has used Basecamp almost exclusively. In fact, the entire Beautiful Trouble ecosystem -- Beautiful Trouble Training, Beautiful Rising, Beautiful Solutions, Climate Ribbon, etc. -- have doubled-down on Basecamp for the time being, as a way to organize our various projects and calendars in one central system. For better or worse, that's where we are today.
The minimum requirements for the project's needs are:
- Communicate easily with the advisory network members
- Communicate with the project participants (in-country participants, external/extended, etc.)
- Share a public calendar of project activities
- Assign tasks to individuals, with due dates
- Share documentation with the public
The "would be nice" requirements are:
- Nested tasks (hierchical)
- Moving one date/task, moves related dates/tasks
- A Gantt chart type view of dates
Via Anna Levy:
Perhaps this falls under 'nested tasks', but it would be very interesting to find a platform that leaves room for individual advisors and Southern partners to do concentrated work/cooperation within the platform (though in a separate space). More than having the separate space, I'm imagining something that allows Southern users to see a menu of skills and interests offered by each advisor, and leave room for direct interaction.
Riseup provides online communication tools for people and groups working on liberatory social change. We are a project to create democratic alternatives and practice self-determination by controlling our own secure means of communications. https://help.riseup.net/
- The right politics 👍
- We know them 👍
- Mailing lists are simple to use 👍
Who to talk to:
- Most of us, I would guess
- We've set-up the advisory network mailing list there for starters
Pulse (previously Syncthing) replaces proprietary sync and cloud services with something open, trustworthy and distributed. Your data is your data alone and you deserve to choose where it is stored, if it is shared with some third party, and how it's transmitted over the Internet.
- Open source 👍
- Private. None of your data is ever stored anywhere other than on your devices. There is no central server that might be compromised, legally or illegally. 👍
- Encrypted. All communication is secured using TLS. The encryption used includes perfect forward secrecy to prevent any eavesdropper from ever gaining access to your data. 👍
- Authenticated. Every node is identified by a strong cryptographic certificate. Only nodes you have explicitly allowed can connect to your cluster. 👍
ownCloud provides access to your data through a web interface or WebDAV while providing a platform to easily view, sync and share across devices—all under your control. ownCloud’s open architecture is extensible via a simple but powerful API for applications and plugins and works with any storage. http://owncloud.org
Who to talk to:
- Gabi Sobliye at Tactical Tech ❓
Issue management: the final frontier. https://github.com/blog/831-issues-2-0-the-next-generation
- Tight integration with Github 👍
- Need a Github account to submit an issue :thumbdown:
- Might be possible to anonymize issue submission with Redliner ❓
Who to talk to:
- @adrian-the-git & @phillipadsmith use them lightly for other Beautiful Trouble projects on Github
- They are used by many for both open source software project, and documentation projects
- Even for collaboratively writing a political manifesto or providing a guide to open source civic software
A collection of open source web applications that help software companies build better software http://phabricator.org/
Who to talk to:
- @auremoser is using
Free, open forum management tool for open threaded discussions
Who to talk to:
- @auremoser is using
A collaborative Gantt chart tool that ports from Google spreadsheets, used at Ushahidi for tracking long term project goals and plumline milestones
Repo: https://github.com/auremoser/pirateplotr
Demo: http://auremoser.github.io/pirateplotr/
- Fulfills Gantt chart ask
- Google spreadsheet based
- All open source, can be forked and reimplemented
- Detailed readme instructions FTW 👍
Who to talk to:
- @auremoser made it :)
Agile Project Management http://www.thoughtworks.com/products/mingle-agile-project-management
- Built & used by Thoughtworks (we love Thoughtworks) 👍
Who to talk to: *
The git-annex assistant creates a synchronised folder on each of your OSX and Linux computers, Android devices, removable drives, NAS appliances, and cloud services. The contents of the folder are the same everywhere. It's very easy to use, and has all the power of git and git-annex.