[GTALUG] At the GTALUG AGM: How we handle Internet services

[Evan Leibovitch]

On Tue, Nov 29, 2022 at 7:37 PM Stewart C. Russell via talk <talk at gtalug.org>
wrote:

> On 27/11/2022 21.01, Evan Leibovitch via talk wrote:
>
>
> Along with other AGM business, we will be discussing how GTALUG goes
> forward with our online services.
>
> I'm glad we're going to have this discussion. Chris Browne's untimely
> passing two years ago showed how heavily GTALUG relied on the work of a
> very few volunteers. And we do have a lot of online services, including:
>
>    - the website;
>    - the mailing lists and their various archives. Maintaining and
>    moderating a mailing list is no trivial thing;
>    - GTALUG Wiki — https://wiki.gtalug.org/start — which I don't think
>    anyone's touched for over two years.
>
> It might be worth re-evaluating what resources we need. Could we make do
> with a hosted WordPress instance and move the lists to groups.io?
>
All ideas are welcomed.

Anything we host ourselves bears both admin resources and financial hosting
cost. Right now we're using mailman and frankly, I see the bounce messages
and it's almost impossible to keep track of.
(Hint: I tried mailing this Sunday night but that bounced). I really don't
like mailman anymore. There are better ways to filter spam.

> Is GTALUG Inc a qualifying non-profit?
>

Yes. We've already been vetted by TechSoup *and* approved by Google. In
fact we've had access to the Google nonprofit package for almost a year and
could move things over to it at any time. The discussion at hand is whether
we want to start really using it.

What happens when Google decides to stop providing this free service?
>

Google had indeed been known to axe products and projects that didn't pan
out as they'd hoped (I particularly mourn the loss of Google Cardboard and
Google Reader). Google for Nonprofits <https://www.google.com/nonprofits/>
is unlikely to be one of them; it's actually very popular. A great many
NPOs -- some of which are household names -- depend on that service. And
with Alphabet being as insanely profitable as it is, the company is
unlikely to jettison its primary CSR
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_social_responsibility> tool.

That said, I'm in no position to guarantee anything.

Where does our data go? “If you are not paying for it, you're not the
> customer; you're the product being sold.”*
>

In this case, it's not the case.

When you use basic personal GMail and Google Docs, you are most certainly
giving up privacy in return for "free" services. But that's not what's on
offer here. We have access to Google Workplace
<https://workspace.google.com/> (formerly known as G Suite) which is the
commercial service that businesses use as a subscription-based productivity
suite. In return for companies paying for Google Workplace, the company
does not scan your data and it's subject to both Canadian and European
privacy laws (after all, the apps themselves are pretty much the same as
the free ones, what Workplace customers are paying for is privacy and
support). What GTALUG has is a no-cost commercial license for Google
Workplace (as well as other stuff including $10K worth of Google search
advertising per month). So we have access to the commercial non-snooped
service at no cost.

- Evan
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