Suggestions for FLOS biketour IC tools

Add your recommendations and comments on the possible FLOS communication tools below:

The aim of this page is to collect a list of possible libre and open-source information and communication technology tools for Biketour purposes.

General arguments about why ecotopiabiketour aims to use and promote FLOS, can be found here.

eMail

Currently: mostly Mr G :( (GOOGLE?) But not the lists - these are run by Ecobytes :)

Preferences: To ensure communication from "outside" and "within" the Biketour Organisers collective. Something that is secure, private, does not steal our data; and will possible filter our messages by subject; keep our lovely name@ecotopiabiketour addresses; with unlimited or lots of 'labels';

Known Alternatives:

• Mail services from tech collectives such as the riseup birds / Nodo50 / Nadir / So36 / N-1:
  • See RU's Radical Services list here [1]
• Round-cube
• Squirrel Mail
• Thunderbird
• Use one of the many free email addresses that often come along with a web hosting contract: If any association or person rents a webspace and registres a domai such as www.myname.net or www.nicepeople.org, sometimes up to 50 email addresses can be installed easily, using the ending @myname.net or @nicepeople.org. If you organise yourself with 50 friends, pay 10eur per month of hosting fees and give everyone an email address, then this would be 20cents per month per person. For email in you own hands, without helping a big corporation making more profit, without advertisement and sometimes even much more ecological.

Adding Encryption

• GPG is the standard (and the highest one too): the easiest way to install this is to use thunderbird with the enigmail add-on installed: from there setup through the wizard is fairly easy. Then, don't forget to share your public key (but not your private one!) with anyone who you want to send encrypted email to you. Everyone should setup email encryption, otherwise you're writing your emails as if on a postcard.
• add-ons for GPG should also be available for other email clients such as outlook (but why use outlook - it's not FLOSS)
• It would be good to install some sort of encryption for the mailing lists too - what software are our current ones on? Sympa definitely has this as a possibility - a quick internet search found a few.

Calendar

Currently use Gcal :(

Preference: For Diary Planning. For arranging meetings. Within the email service or not.

Known Alternatives:

• ical/caldav are open formats (I think) and it should be fairly easy to install a CalDav or ical server on the ecobytes hosting service... a quick search of sourceforge threw up this: http://sourceforge.net/projects/modcaldav/?source=directory
• Then there are a huge range of clients available that can support these - the lightning add-on for thunderbird can do it, and most linux distros will have their own clients. These clients will generally support gcal as well, which makes the transition easier...

• Doodle
• Paper and pen

Website & Blog

Currently: wordpress-based, privately hosted website through the very cool Ecobytes :)

Voice over IP

Currently: mostly private Skype accounts :(

Preferences: Voice and or video meetings.

Known Alternatives:

• THere is an open VOIP standard - XMPP (or more specifically the jingle extension to it).

http://www.jabber.org/ hosts XMPP accounts - it might be possible to host our own as well?? There are a variety of clients available for this: see this list (list of clients). Google Talk also uses this protocol which means that people using other clients/hosts can talk to people using Google Talk. (unlike skype - where you have to be on skype)

• SIP is another standard

• Mumble
• Pigin (supports XMPP)
• Adium (for Mac OS)

Collaborative working on texts / documents / archive

Currently: mediawiki wiki - but its not 'secure'

Preferences: Getting organised / handover / archive / storage / public space with private options

Known Alternatives

• Crabgrass

Collaborative Mapping

Previously: Gmaps and Street maps

Preferences: Decentrally collecting tips for places to visit, lay out routes, mark interesting regions, overlap with other interesting thematical maps/layers (e.g. from other tours or bike maps)

Known Alternatives:

• Street Map
• http://open.mapquest.co.uk/
  • a typical example how big corporations (mis-)use open source data for their own purposes: mapquest is a company of AOL.
  • But it does use open data and allow it to be edited - and the search works
• http://osmtools.de/easymap/
  • takes a little while to get used to it, but pretty self-explaining. unfortunately not suitable for collaboration, since the map has to be locally saved (and then transferred on a web site) each time.

- this map was made with easymap: http://www.memfarado.org/projects/ecotopiabiketour/2013/route/map/map.html

Examples

• http://vivirbien.mediavirus.org : collaborative mapping of solidarity economy

File hosting / File sharing

Preferences: Anyone being able to easily provide larger files for exchange (photos, maps, ...) which are too big for mailing lists and might not interest everyone on a list.

Known Alternatives:

• wiki (not secure and not really the purpose of it, but possible)
• FTP as the technology; FTP clients (like filezilla) as the tool
• Fengu (?)
• EyeOS (?)

Social Networking

Currently we have a facebook page with 1000's of likes :(

Preferences: Something that does not track our friends or circles for suspicious behavior when we think it is a closed network ... it is not. Something that connects us as a 'bridge' to the mainstream - so we do not constantly talk within the same circles... our 'outreach' of you will.

Known Alternatives:

• Diaspora
• we.riseup.net (based on the crabgrass software; not mainstream)
• Identica
• "simple, good old" forums:
  • Ecotopia Forum from the website ??? would probably not have the same 'reach'

Micro Blogging

Currently we have a Twitter account but do not use it :)

Preferences: Same as above

Known Alternatives:

• Identica

Question: is this really essential communication????

Web > tel : Bridging

Currently use expensive sms mobile phones :(

Preferences: Cheap way of providing (short) info (sms style) to global phone networks from the web (for example when we are on the road or others are on the road to join us)

Known Alternatives:

• Not sending them
• Web phone ???

Graphics Tools

Preferences: To make things look cool with a conscience...

Know Alternatives:

• Lightworks (video editing)
• Blender (animation)
• Gimp (vector designs and 2d artwork)
• inkscape (vector images): our logo was made with this!

Photo Sharing

Currently an internal gallery & private flickr accounts :(

Preferences: To share our beautiful experiences as images and slide shows

Know Alternatives:

• Pingu

Other Tools ????

Tools we are not yet aware of???

Preferences: That will make our online lives a better place - maybe a personal project? :)

Know Alternatives:

• Cool Tool 1
• Cool Tool 2
• Cool Tool 3 ...