I have been thinking about how to offer alternatives to Facebook, WhatsApp, Zoom etc for non-technical people, many of whom are finding the Internet and computers much more central to their lives than they did before the pandemic.
Many people are members of small organisations who are moving online -and the only option they can find and understand is to create a Facebook Group, use Facebook messenger or WhatsApp to communicate, and Zoom for meetings. Debian developers know there are alternatives, but setting up email servers, Wordpress, Instant Messenger, ActivityPub servers, jitsi etc does not appeal to a group whose interests lie not in the technology, but in what it can do for them. I have written at https://wordpress.debian.social/jlines/2020/11/07/the-ambridge-garden-club/ about a such a group, as I am interested to know if others feel this is also a problem, and a one worth trying to solve. My proposed solution is a Debian Pure Blend for a Small Organisation Server (sos) designed to be installed at a hosting provider, and accessed and administered through a web interface. It shares quite a lot of similarity, and should probably, have as much as possible in common with the FreedomBox project - for example probably plinth. It is differentiated from FreedomBox at at technical level by, for example, not using avahi - the Small Organisation Sever would share a local network at an ISP with other completely unrelated servers, neither would should it depend on netcat-openbsd, ppp, pppoe etc, which are targetted at a different situation. I think it would be good to be able to provide the facilities available via https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DebianSocial to other organisations, and wonder it you agree ? John
