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Private funder

Status: accepted

Project Title

Co-op Cloud Federation & abra critical bug fixes

Explain the project and its expected outcome(s).

We are requesting support to tackle two important tasks in Co-op Cloud, to improve the project’s long-term sustainability:

  • Formalising, and publicly launching the “Co-op Cloud Federation”,
  • Fixing critical usability issues in abra which are hindering further adoption.

The Federation

In April 2022, we announced our proposal for how the Co-op Cloud federation could function:

We’ve gathered feedback from community members and are ready to take the proposal forward. This period of feedback gathering went beyond our ECF Culture of Solidarity funding timeline, so we are happy to receive support to finalise it now.

This will mean formalising our decision-making structure, clarifying membership in the federation and helping lay the foundations for economic self-sufficiency through agreed membership and user group fees.

We propose a series of meetings with active community members to achieve this.

Critical abra bug fixes

We have identified a few bugs in theabra commandline tool that, once sorted, will greatly improve adoption of Co-op Cloud. This support will help us fix these bugs which takes us one step closer to a stable 1.0 release.

  • Making abra resilient to outages in git.coopcloud.tech and the machine-readable recipes.coopcloud.tech/recipes.json (issue #292)

  • Supporting language translations for the Co-op Cloud website and documentation (issue coop-cloud/organising#74)

  • Bringing per-recipe documentation up-to-date with the latest abra syntax (issue coop-cloud/organising#356)

  • Solidifying the machine-readable recipes.coopcloud.tech/recipes.json deployment (issue coop-cloud/recipes-catalogue-json#3)

  • Making some usability tweaks to abra’s interface (issue coop-cloud/organising#335 and issue coop-cloud/organising#308)

  • Stabilising how abra interacts with SSH (issue coop-cloud/organising#345)

Requested Amount

  • 9,240 GBP

Explain what the requested budget will be used for?

  • Participation of all members at a series of meetings to discuss the proposal

    • 60 GBP * 1 member from 8 member collectives * 6 hrs (3 meetings, 2 hr a meet) = 2880GBP

  • Paying wages for 5 Autonomic members to collect feedback, amend the proposal & publish it

    • 60 GBP * 5 members * 6 hrs = 1800GBP (collective meets)
    • 60 GBP * 5 members * 4 hrs = 1200GBP (internal meets)
    • 60 GBP * 1 member * 5 hrs = 300GBP (finance admin)

  • Paying wages for 3 external contributors helping in the process (bug fix, writing, etc)

    • 60 GBP * 3 members * 5 hrs = 900GBP

  • Implementing the proposal: 3 months of admin time until which point we have enough members to support ongoing admin costs

    • 60 GBP * 1 member * 2 hrs * 3 months = 360 GBP

  • abra critical usability fixes

    • 60 GBP * 2 members * 15 hrs = 1800 GBP

What are significant challenges you expect to face?

Designing and settling on a format for the federation will be our main challenge. We expect that working together within a diversity of co-operatives and group members will present a spectrum of opinions on how the federation ought to function. Finding common ground amongst ourselves may pose a challenge. Finding a sufficient number of members for a functioning federation may be difficult.

While we all have a lot of experience with group decision-making through our involvement in Autonomic and other multi-stakeholder co-operatives, it could be a challenge to settle on a decision making system.

Describe the ecosystem of the project, and how you will engage with relevant actors and promote the outcomes?

Several collectives are using Co-op Cloud as their preferred hosting method for example Bonfire and Local-IT (see "Co-op Cloud “The Organisation”" on The Co-op Cloud Public Beta for the full list of participants).

We have over 500 followers on Mastodon, but our primary communication and recruitment relies on word of mouth, and people inviting each other to our Matrix channel. The community members have already written articles about Co-op Cloud and we expect this to happen again.