mlncn-presentations/small-sites/abstract-small-sites-drupal.md

In January's meeting, we learned about Drupal for big projects. Is there still a place for small sites in the Drupal ecosystem?

Yes. The same features that make Drupal projects consistent, repeatable and maintainable for large corporations can contribute to an affordable and independent offering for much smaller websites.

Benjamin Melançon from Agaric will tell us all about Drutopia, an ecosystem of Drupal distributions. The project is at a crossroads of the two ways to make the power of Drupal accessible to grassroots groups— solely as a quick-start distribution, or as a cooperative platform that offer an alternative to services like Squarespace or Wix without the black-box, proprietary code business model and vendor lock-in.

Initial description from https://www.meetup.com/Twin-Cities-Drupal-Group/events/267069414/



First question of course is why?  We're cold, calculating professionals, every one of us.  We use the best tool available.

  * Webforms
  * Structured content
  * Faceted search
  * Fine-grained permissions
  * Development workflow that's not just editing configuration on live

What are your reasons?

With the why rationalized, let's move on to how.


Approaches:

  * Make things easier
  * Do things at a sufficient scale that the cost of the difficult parts are spread thinly across many sites



## Making things easier

* Sharing configuration (feature modules)

* Skins instead of subthemes


### Distributions


## Growing big enough that the bumps seem tiny

### SaaS

  * Localeyz, a Drupal-based service for local media, but their code is not shared as far as i can tell.
  * Wix, Squarespace, Weebly, etc.
  * Salesforce
  * Pantheon


### Distributions + SaaS == LibreSaaS

(A term I coined, but someone else coined it independently.  Which makes it a movement.)

  * Round Earth, Drupal + CiviCRM by Drupal support and maintenance experts MyDropWizard.
  * Open Social
  * [Open Church](http://openchurchsite.com/ )
  * [Farmier](https://farmier.com ), in Drupal 7.

Then, not a Drupal distribution but Drupal adjacent, there's Centarro:

Commerce Guys rebranded as Centarro as they move to offering software as a service— taking on the especially tricky bits of commerce that you don’t want running on your site.

Ryan Szrama encapsulated LibreSaaS beautifully when he said that in addition to the “no lockin” part of being fully GPL Libre Software, the promise of greater collaboration is why they didn’t go proprietary SaaS.

And also Roomify, built on Drupal 8.

Probo.CI, not Drupal but built by ZivTech, a longtime Drupal company.

Outside Drupal, there's a lot more examples, and a lot more economically thriving platforms that charge for their hosting services but make their code freely available:

  * Discourse
  * Ghost
  * Tendenci
  * Wallabag, a pocket-like service
  * [Goteo](https://en.goteo.org/ )
  * [Open Collective](https://opencollective.com/ )
  * Standard Notes
  * Write.as (formerly Overleaf)
  * [Loomio](https://loomio.org )
  * WordPress.org

See more at LibreSaas.org

That's a lot, really.  But why not more?  And why are few people, even in tech, even aware of it as an idea and a practice?

Every cloud service, every SaaS, all the big platforms you can think of are almost invariably built on a mostly Free Software stack: the operating system, the server, the programming languages, the databases, the libraries, all of it!

Some, like Slack or most infamously AWS, are making piles of money on a relatively thin slice of proprietary code pulling it all together.  Why can’t FLOSS move into that?

I'm giving this talk because I think part of the reason is lack of awareness as a business model.  And therefore, lack of explaining its benefits.



# SaaS + Democracy == Platform Cooperative

A cooperative is a jointly owned and democratically-controlled enterprise formed by people voluntarily uniting to meet their common needs and aspirations. https://agaric.coop/blog/putting-powerful-platforms-under-cooperative-control

Localeyz, the closed-source Drupal-as-a-service mentioned earlier, is also cooperative platform.

See many more at https://ioo.coop/directory/


Wisdom from the labor movement:

"If we're not focused on things that build scale, we're not building institutions that change society.  And if we're not building institutions that change society, we're not doing what we need to do."
     — David Hammer (ICA)



# Redecentralization

I've essentially been talking about centralizing our way to being able to compete with the proprietary platforms.

That hasn't been fashionable in tech circles since... ever.  We're supposed to create decentralized protocols 

and of course, Mastodon is a pretty big success (find me on social.coop), but despite the relative decentralization, it's a fairly fragile ecosystem.

Cooperative platforms can provide the business model which 



It has a business model that works for Free Software (people don't *care* whether it is or not, but at least libre software isn't at a disadvantage.
It has qualities that are enterprise and movement friendly (the easy to get started, can take full ownership/control as needed angle)

# Cooperative Platforms powered by LibreSaaS

  * [Social.coop](https://wiki.social.coop/home.html ) and [Sunbeam.City](https://sunbeam.city/about/more ), running on Mastodon (and also using Loomio and Open Collective).
  * [CoopCycle](https://coopcycle.org/en/ ), the European federation of bike delivery coops. Governed democratically by coops, it enables them to stand united and to reduce their costs— including by producing Libre Software.
  * [Fairmondo](https://www.fairmondo.de/ ), an online marketplace (Germany).
  * [May First Movement Technology](https://mayfirst.coop/en/ )
  * [Webarchitects Co-operative](https://www.webarchitects.coop/ ), a multi-stakeholder co-operative providing ethical (including Free/Libre Open Source Software) and green, web hosting, virtual servers, and GNU/Linux sysadmin support services
  * [RChain Cooperative](https://rchain.coop/ ), a blockchain platform of social coordination technologies.


# Community

At the end of the decade, it's community that matters.

Benjamin Mako Hill: A decade ago, the kind of mass collaboration that made Wikipedia, GNU/Linux, or Couchsurfing possible was the exclusive domain of people producing freely and openly in commons. Not only is this no longer true, new proprietary, firm-controlled, and money-based models are increasingly replacing, displacing, outcompeting, and potentially reducing what's available in the commons.

For example, Salesforce has built a hugely impressive community— there will be a few more people than we have here going to their meetup in Minneapolis tomorrow, and every Saturday.

It's not all bad.  If you search for "Squarespace" or "Wix" on Meetup.com, the only meetup that comes up is this one!

Of course, Meetup.com itself sold out to the biggest real estate scam of .. well, the past two years .. [WeWork](https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/01/wework-is-a-scam ).




Historically, under pressure, many people have turned to forming cooperative associations.

Jessica Gordon Nembhard chronicles many of these.

The Federation of Southern Cooperatives, started in 1967 to help shore up an economic foundation to civil rights, 



# Democratic, cooperative communication

It's no secret, as Frank Chapman of the [National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression](https://naarpr.org/ ) reminded people just a few blocks from here, that you build political power by going door to door and finding supporters.

What would our political movements be able to do if we didn't have to redo all the grunt work every time?

Or if people weren't canvassed only by campaigns, but asked about their needs?

In this area, we'd probably have gotten all the lead out of the drinking and cooking water by now.

We might have a solution to the problems of people being unable to afford to live here.





Drutopia?