Description of the issue
In recent years, all around the world and also in the Wikimedia movement it is really complicated to fight proprietary software, fight the JavaScript trap phenomenon and fight service as a software substitute, since GAFAM (but in particular Google) invest millions of dollars in the insinuation into every social and working aspect of human beings, to increase loyalty to your services etc.
The core issue is that digital freedom costs time or money while a proprietary prison is almost always shiny and gratis.
That's why many Wikimedians, from volunteers to staff members, if they need a document they use Google Docs, if they need a form they use Google Form, if they need a spreadsheet they use Google Docs, etc. and this issue is damn widespread. I've seen at least 4 Wikimedian Google Form questionnaires since this January 2021, where you were asked what your sexual identity was, saying that the questionnaire was anonymous, while in the meantime the user was almost certainly 99.99999% logged into Google and that was assumed as perfectly normal, since often these links to Google Form were even linked from Wikimedian sitenotices.
But this is not normal.
Proposed solution
It seems that CryptPad is a Free/Libre software which is damn simple to use and adopt and provides:
- shared documents
- shared spreadsheet
- shared presentations
- shared filesystem
- shared programming IDEs (awww that's really nice)
- shared forms
And maybe more.
Some Italian communities like Devol already installed their CryptPad instance and they work just great. See it in action:
What communities like Devol are demonstrating is that a less centralized Internet is possible and affordable.
Similarly, a CryptPad instance could be installed into WMIT infrastructure just as we installed WMI framadate and other things.
Installation instructions:
https://docs.cryptpad.fr/en/admin_guide/installation.html
Also it would be nice to contribute to CryptPad development somehow. One entry point: