Here we describe the second trio in 'the gang of nine' - categories of digital tooling for organising, collaborating and facilitating in civil society and the real economy.
Trio #2 - Persistent and live collaboration
If the first trio is basic communication, valuable in any 'social' setting, this second trio is for communities who are settling in for a longer haul or a deeper or more intense relationship.
See DisCO stack for some evolutionary background to this trio. DisCO as an approach - Distributed Cooperative Organisation - continues to be meaningful too.
All of the affordances in this trio have become commonplace in the past five years.
# Video room share Has become ubiquitous. Zoom and Teams are predominant; many alternative platforms running FLOSS software are available, some of them operated by coops as paid member services. Examples are meet.coop (running BigBlueButton), May First Movement Technology (running Jitsi).
When this 'gang of nine' classification was in its early stages, just five years back, video rooms were not that familiar. Today they're widespread, and chatting in video is routinely integrated into text chat - in WhatsApp or Matrix for example.
But we'll keep shared video rooms here in the second trio, because it's an important way to establish 'venue space', where communities of collaborators can assemble and cultivate the 'look and fee; of relationships, review and explore things, check things out, and prepare to make decisions. See the real full stack: Venue space
# Cloud file share Again, has become very widespread. Many folks have jumped into Google's Workspace or have been trapped unwittingly in Microsoft's ecosystem via OneDrive, and thus take cloud sharing for granted.
Again, there are many alternative services that run open FLOSS software. Platforms running the NextCloud FLOSS stack are among the most common ways of furnishing a community with a shared cloud. Some coops offer a NextCloud cloud hosting service: May First Movement Technology is an example. It's bundled together with email service and access to a community forum (First trio).
# Author share Collaborative authoring is now taken for granted as basic 'groupware'. Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 are among the predominant corporate platforms.
There are many FLOSS-based platforms running various kinds of co-authoring environments, based on various **protocols**. For example - Etherpad, known often as Riseup pads. Beautifully simple. But incorporates live chat (First trio). - Markdown protocol - for example Notes, Files and Collectives within the NextCloud stack. - OpenDoc protocol - not so beautiful, full of feature bloat, sadly mimicking MS Word in its look-and-feel even as it attempts to escape the monopoly.
The French government (as part of la Suite Numerique) has sponsored the development of Docs, which promises to be an excellent, clean-looking, few-frills collaboration environment. Docs will write and navigate wikii-form collections of documents too (First trio: reference).
--- For a review of particular tools, see: - Trio 2 review - Video room share - *xxx to be added* - Trio 2 review - Cloud file share - *xxx to be added* - Trio 2 review - Author share - *xxx to be added*