Re: [libreplanet-discuss] how would an activist start with Free Software?

[Fabio Pesari]

On 02/07/2016 11:02 AM, Daniel Pocock wrote:
> d) use (what?) for

> building online community,

There are various way to do it. GNU Social or Diaspora is one such way,
otherwise you could just use MediaWiki.

You can make a website easily using a static site generator like Jekyll,
and host it at zero cost on tuxfamily.org or nongnu.org if it's a libre
project.

> registering volunteers

A wiki and/or a mailing list is the most popular approach, otherwise you
can use a CRM program.

> raising funds

For regular payments, CrowdSupply is probably the best choice right now
(they take a 5% cut), otherwise BitCoin.

> organizing meetings

Do you mean regular meetings or events?

In the former case, ownCloud's calendar can do it, in the latter, a wiki
would suffice.

> sharing documents/multimedia, etc

MediaGoblin can share everything and so can ownCloud;
EtherCalc + EtherPad can replace Google Docs, and Kolab is about to
include a browser version of LibreOffice.

Other suggestions: the best way to chat across multiple devices right
now is either Tox or Ring or Rocket.chat.

The easiest way to self-host things for beginners is
Sandstorm (https://sandstorm.io/).

The people at Sandstorm also developed a free replacement for Google
Forms called Sandforms, so there are actually very few things for which
we don't have free replacements.

OpenStreetMaps can be used for anything that involves maps.

For free project hosting, outside of self-hosting a service like Gitlab
or Gogs, NotABug (https://notabug.org/) is probably the easiest solution
right now, since it only allows projects released under libre licenses.

I think it would be good if a single resource that contains all this
information existed, though.