 I'm really sorry, but I'm going to have to please keep up with you just with that half of your time. Nice! Okay, so our next speaker is Mark Booth from Datapik. If I understood correctly, Datapik is a company providing hosting services for their customer, right? After a fashion, yes. Okay, so I leave the room to you. I'm sorry that you will have only 15 minutes for your talk. That's fine. I'll try to keep it brief. My name's Matt, and I'm a programmer based in Sheffield in the UK, and I co-founded this organisation, the Datapik Data Cooperative. Now, Sheffield has a pretty active grassroots tech scene, and if you've been to the FOSDEM beer event, you'll know that the IT scene has a pretty severe beer problem. So it's appropriate that this project began in a pub in Sheffield. This pub, which I highly recommend. And I found myself talking to the programmers after, like, take meet-ups and discovered that we had some common interests. We were all kind of into hosting things for ourselves. We all, like, had our own websites. Someone was hosting a mailing list. Someone was hosting Git repos, that kind of thing. And we all had a shared interest in not being the product. I'm sure everyone in this room in particular is familiar with the concept where if you're not paying for a service, you're the product. And we want to avoid that. And avoid data that's kept about us from being used in ways we don't control. So we begin to wonder how we can collaborate with an aim to share the cost of hosting things so that we don't all have to buy servers. We can just, you know, all use the same one. And then we can share expertise as well because we're not all experts in all of the things that we want to use. With the eventual goal of, you know, weaning ourselves off of Google and Tile and things like that. So if only there was some kind of organization we could start of which we could all be members ourselves and then we could charge our members fees and then use those fees to pay for the infrastructure and develop the services. And then because user data abusers are a hot topic in the news all the time then maybe, you know, other people outside of our little group would be interested in joining as well. And then we could give all of those members a say in how the organization is run and give them control on how their data is being used. So let's start a co-op. This is pretty much the dictionary definition. What we wanted to do was pretty much the dictionary definition of a co-op where we want to be an autonomous association of people who are united voluntarily to meet our common needs with a jointly owned and democratically controlled social enterprise. So we approached an organization in Sheffield called the SCDG, the Sheffield Co-op Development Group and they are part of Co-op to UK and they offer advice and help people set up cooperative organizations. So we spoke to those people and they... So Co-op to UK offer a whole bunch of templates for starting companies as cooperatives or charitable trusts and the Sheffield Development Group were able to sort of narrow down once we described what we want to do they narrowed it down to these three kinds of co-ops that they thought might suit us best. The first one community interest company I think we dismissed straight away because it comes with some obligations like proving... like doing reports on how you are involving the local community and proving that your company is a value to the local... there was extra administrative overhead we thought that we didn't really need the multi-stakeholder cooperative we dismissed but I don't really remember why so we eventually settled on forming a consortium and the consortium is a cooperative that is owned and controlled by the people who use the services which is us and members get involved by paying for those services and I've got a note here I think in mainland Europe this is sometimes known as a small enterprise cooperative if that means something so we decided to start ourselves a cooperative so we bought a domain we started a company for I think it cost us like 100, 150 quid some nominal amount of money to start the company and then you can have yourself a company limited by a guarantee that can follow the principles of a cooperative so now I'd like to try and convince you about the pros and cons of starting a co-op yourself there is some minor drawbacks there's some amount of admin work you have to do we have to hold general meetings throughout the year with agendas and things we have to... there's a comedy resolution that we have to pass every year which is to, as the board of directors of the cooperative we have to pass a resolution to not be audited because we have under the Revenue Special to that I don't know who chooses to be audited makes no sense to me we also have to pay an accountant which just, I mean you could do the paperwork yourself I suppose but who wants to deal with HMRC but that just does bump up the cost of the organisation but the benefits I think outweigh that so you have shared responsibility you join the co-op, hooray! you're no longer doing things on your own one of the policies we've instituted is if you want to host a service in the co-op you have to have buy-in from one of the member which just means that, you know, you've got vacation cover and sickness cover and shares of responsibility of maintaining a service we've got shared accounting, we started a business bank account obviously to collect the membership fees and to pay for the hosting and whatnot and shared expertise, as I said earlier which is very good because, you know you might have maintained a mail server I've never maintained a mail service but we both want mail servers we can have a CLA a contributor licence agreement or copyright assignment agreement for our members that's quite interesting because the protection that gives you is twofold it protects the members because without this in any licence squabble we would only be able to act on violations if the co-op itself owns the copyright on the code and it also protects the co-op because if you get a contribution from a member that turns out to originate from a proprietary product then you can shift the liability back to the misbehaving member because they contractually agreed that their contribution was not infringing and there are a couple of unexpected benefits like as in a technical sense I'm the director of a company I can sign people's passports that was unexpected and of course we have democratic operation which kind of brings us to our principles as a co-operative I apologise if this is a bit repetitive if you caught the Libra hostess talk earlier we have a bit of overlap so we give you data with representation so you get a say in how your data is treated within the organisation and we give you time to migrate if you're leaving and we'll make all efforts we can to remove your data after you've left we promote the dignity of data ownership so we value your privacy and the control that you have over how you share information with others we give you the freedom to host yourselves so any services that we host you should be able to host on your own as well that is like one of the best probably the only way right now where you can migrate your data somewhere else you just fire up a new instance of our services somewhere else and import your data that's probably the easiest way to do it and obviously all of our services are free and open source so that enables that and we also try to federate and interoperate wherever possible like with our Macedon instance we can interact with people on other Macedon instances which is good, we rely on open standards and if a standard is open an open source implementation of that standard is pretty much guaranteed to follow so some technical hurdles that we had I mentioned earlier we're not CIS admins we're programmers with our powers combined we make just about one barely competent CIS admin I've developed a lot of respect for system administrators in this project so good work guys we started out on this adventure using Docker we wanted to break all of the services down into there into smaller components and do it right but in the end it didn't really work out for us I don't think Docker was really solving any problems that we had in terms of scalability and what not so eventually we just we got rid of that and then we are now managing VMs using Ansible if you've used Ansible before it's just YAML files that tell the VM how to behave we added a a single sign-on feature which was quite interesting we used so being able to log into one of the application and then have that authenticated session follow you to the other applications that we host is a really nice feature for users but it turns out almost no applications support it and this actually prompted a move from Nginx to Apache because Apache has a better single sign-on plugin called ModMelon which we use and then that fronts a lot of our services behind that the two factor authentication again, great feature for users it gives users confidence in the security and what not users have problems with this in particular if you're using a mobile app to speak to any of our hosted services there's not always it's not always easy it's not always in particular my IRC client is a real pain to use with two factor authentication so we've had to we ended up making that optional for now but hopefully in the future we can make it you know users to make it mandatory for their accounts and email email on my notes here it says big, scary, important, easy to get wrong and a few of us have made attempts hosting our own email services and again it can't be said enough where programmers not sysadmins, we've always been scared away so what we'll probably do is outsource that to another another small cooperative in Sheffield hopefully we can get those guys on board to help us out with that and I'm aware that I was late starting so I guess I'll wrap up there if you want to discover more about us here at darkpeak.org you can chat to us on IRC I'm M Booth in the Dark Peak channel thank you very much for listening so you're a magician you did it so thank you and again I apologize on behalf of the organisation team now if there is any question yes I have two questions, number one can you join me from Manchester yes we've got a member in Edinburgh and until not long ago we had a member in Norway we convinced him to move to Sheffield though and number two is a bit more complicated a lot of your talk focused on the sort of organising model of the cooperative how do you think that or like what principles from the cooperative organising model do you think can be applied to open source development or free software development that is interesting question I think they're kind of in separate I think the two are kind of orthogonal because for open source project development a quite good model is the dictator for life model you have someone who's in charge of the vision for the software project but that project is not responsible for other people's data so if you're in a member of an organisation that is dealing with your data you want more democratic control over it it's better for users I think any questions how do you do SSO with the email you don't do email we don't do email yet no so there are people in the UK at the moment trying to sort of centralise planning for hackspaces have you talked to them because you sort of probably have very similar goals and ideas to them I have not I'm afraid but I will look into it thanks so why not docker yeah so I didn't go into too much detail then but we found it it was for one it was impenetrable for newcomers to the organisation not everyone's got experience with docker and the necessary steps you have to take to get up and running with it and we got ourselves into a situation where production deployments of the infrastructure was done from a single member's laptop so we wanted to like maybe this is like too risky let's make it something let's base it on something that more people are familiar with out of the box which a lot more people in my experience have had experience with ansible and things like ansible yeah come to the Libro Hostos Matrix channel and we can discuss about kubernetes and this kind of things also if you're interested okay if there is no more question thank you very much don't forget to give constructive feedback on the FOSDEM website