Solidarity Economy Hosting

A DRAFT Merri-bek Tech Proposal.

Merri-bek Tech will work with select local businesses which run environmentally sustainable FOSS web hosting. We will ensure users experience a seamless local experience while providing a pathway for users payments to go to the hosting providers they use most.

Unlike the LoRes approach of running small servers on Raspberry Pis, the businesses we work with may choose to run larger servers for more centralised offerings, however they will still be part of the LoRes Mesh, will be running on renewables, and will be largely within the local region.

Our approach to working with businesses will be strongly values-based, and while we are open to many different ways that businesses can meet our requirements, we expect that only organisations such as radical digital co-operatives that are firmly committed to building post-capitalist and commons based futures will quality.

1. More FOSS: Accelerate the move off “big tech” and on to liberatory and Open-Source Software for people and groups in our region.
2. Not free as in “free beer”: Slowly shift user expectations that cloud usage has no cost, as typically those costs are just externalised to environmental damage and surveillance capitalism, without creating unnecessary barriers to goal 1.
3. A pathway to just livelihoods: Developing and maintaining software is labour, and if it's going to be part of our community it needs to be part of our economy. Historically, the tech industry has often increased economic inequality, and by practicing fairer wars to pay software livelihoods we are building something different.
4. Participation in new economies: Software is often the connecting glue that shapes economic interactions. As many groups experiment with economic relations beyond late-stage neo-liberal capitalism, we wish to support this by participating in broader movements for solidarity and by supporting a plurality of economic options.
5. Valuing stewardship: Often the software industry, and the open source movement, values the creation of new things, but does a poor job of valuing the day to date maintenance, and the long-term stewardship of services and data important to our users.

1. Enclosing the digital commons: There is a risk that charging for FOSS hosting will place commercial pressures on digital services so necessary to people's lives that they should be more properly be considered a commons.
2. Barriers to entry: Charging for software could, at best, slow down the rate at which people move off big tech (especially since we're often competing with a free product), and at worse act as a barrier to access for people who most need the services.
3. Increase class divide: Software professionals have often earned way more than blue-collar workers, creating a tendency for the tech industry to act in reactionary ways (in service of bosses and billionaires rather than fellow workers).
4. Sudden disappearance: Businesses can close up shop suddenly, leaving users without services they have come to depend on, and often even without access to their data.
5. User lock-in: Charging users tends to create incentives to lock users in to working with a particular business, often resulting in an inability to export data, interoperate or leave the service.

MBT is committed to developing local internet services which are resilient in the face of climate disasters, it does this as part of the LoRes Mesh project, which may also be used by other groups.

In the LoRes approach, most servers are physically within the geographic region being served. The servers are networked together, both for redundancy, and also to ensure that users have an access point nearby that they can reach in times of emergency. The “Region” should be large enough to include multiple key community locations in and around where people live, while being small enough that it can be collectively managed.

It's a big ask to get our users to go from thinking of the internet as an infinitely-scalable and always-available “cloud” - to thinking of it as something local that they can see and touch. It may be too big of a jump for users to have their data and services tied to only one location, and so LoRes assumes that the ideal is to replicate these services around the region, and have key aspects of the service (such as the ability to log in with a specific username and password) work at any location in the region.

MBT will steward a Region (or regions) in the inner north of Naarm, to prove that this concept works. In most cases, we expect the region to be the digital platform “brand” that users engage with, even if services within than region are supplied by a combination of several business and volunteer organisations. In some cases, power users, larger organisations, and those seeking custom services (eg; web design) might deal directly with our partner organisations.

The LoRes project currently makes the following assumptions of all nodes in the system:

• Each node runs the LoRes Node software to collaboratively manage the region.
• Nodes use https://coopcloud.tech/ to manage installed software.

As LoRes moves into the next milestone, it faces a range of new tech choices that need to be made. In particular, the choice of Identity and Access Management (IAM)| platform is critical for providing users with a seamless experience across the region.

Building multi-node, locally-resilient software is hard. The LoRes project is going to make slow and steady progress. The organisations providing Solidarity Economy Hosting will hopefully go much faster, and supply services to users and organisations using a smaller number of larger servers. The expectation on this arrangement, however, is that in the areas that LoRes does cover, all partner organisations will also be compatible with those areas.

For a business to qualify as part of the MBT solidarity economy hosting, it must meet the following criteria:

1. Structural alignment with the Solidarity Economy (goal 4)
   1. The business must not make profit, over and above the amount it pays for labour.
   2. The business must not provide returns to investors. It may service loans for equipment and related setup costs.
   3. The business must enshrine it's Solidarity Economy alignment in it's structure. The simplest way to do this is for it to be a registered Co-operative. Other legal structures are possible though, and unincorporated collectives will be considered if they clarify their structure in other ways.
2. Enshrining commons stewardship (risks 1, 4, 5)
   1. The business must have a method for addressing the rights of it's current users, and those in the region who's needs are similar to it's offering but may be excluded for some reason.