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 user 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 3, 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.
   4. The business must meaningfully participate in labour solidarity, eg: by having full union membership
2. Enshrining commons stewardship (risks 1, 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. Elements of Platform Co-operativeism are one way to address this.
3. End-of-life plan (risk 4)
   1. The business must have a specific and actionable plan to wind itself up in a way that:
      1. ensures that all data is returned to users in a useful way
      2. takes reasonable steps to move users onto other similar services
      3. provides opportunity for other groups to take over servers and other infrastructure
4. Participation in a collaborative network (goal 4, risks 1, 5)
   1. The business must participate in democratic processes with MBT and other partner organisations to set platform prices, review these structural requirements, and ensure interoperability.
5. Voluntary simplicity (goal 3, risk 3)
   1. The business must ensure that its internal labour payments do no widen inequality
      1. This should include a plan to avoid inequality within the business, which could include a cap in the ratio of highest to lowest earner, policy around the gender pay gap, or other approaches.
   2. Total labour payments for the business must not pass a threshold per-person which is agreed between MBT and all partner businesses. This is initially set at the australian award rates for childcare workers.
6. Sustainable and FOSS (goal 1)
   1. While the business can also engage in other operations, all it's services withing a MBT regional context should be Qualifying Services on Qualifying Servers.
7. Participate in Land Back (goal 4)
   1. If the business is run by settlers, it must contribute a percentage of it's gross revenue to land-back financial programs such as “pay the rent”. That percentages is set by MBT in consultation with all partner businesses, and is initially 10%.

The services that the business runs that are advertised through the MBT region or run on servers that are part of that must meet the following criteria:

1. FOSS (goal 1)
   1. All hosted software services must be Free and Open Source Software, with the note that:
      1. Software licenses that restrict harms or restrict the software to liberatory uses, such as the Anti-Capitalist License, or the Reticulum License are considered to meet this requirement by MBT despite the fact that many open source groups do not consider them to do so.
2. LoRes Compatible
   1. If a software service is something that is covered by LoRes, and it is being delivered to the general public, then the LoRes approach must be available and recommended. Other approaches are also able to be delivered alongside, and recommended for specific customer segments and use-cases.

The servers that the business operates to run it's hosting services as part of this arrangement must meet the following criteria:

1. Local: All servers must be in the designated region (ideally) or within 1km of the region boundary, with the exception of:
   1. Cloud/Data-center servers may be used for offsite backups, optional tools connecting to other cloud services, and/or DNS - providing that they are not hosted with Amazon, Google or Microsoft.
2. Powered by Renewables: All servers must be able to be 100% powered by renewables in optimal conditions, and achieve at least 80% renewable power on average
   1. Renewable power generation must be on-site (ideally), or arranged through a local grass-roots run community installation within the region.
3. Resilient fallback: Within one year of operation, all server locations must remain online for a three-day power outage, providing at least the level of functionality currently supported by LoRes. That does not mean all computers must be powered for three days, it's fine for large servers to turn off and leave lower powered servers to provide this functionality