Introduction

If you’ve been online and an activist for long enough, you’re probably familiar with the tools of the trade – an endless deluge of disorganized Google Docs, pages Slack Workspaces and channels, Office files emailed back and forth with a long tail of FINAL_REV_FINAL2 notes added on the end. You have also probably experienced some of the downsides to these tools – files that go missing when their owner disappears, valuable Slack conversations lost to the black hole of the 10,000 message limit, or confusion with volunteers who don’t have an Office license to edit that doc.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Now more than ever before, it’s easier to take your data and your tools into your own hands, rather than relying on the prying eyes and high costs of Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, or Google. Your chapter can make the switch from programs that harvest your data and restrict features from non-paying users to useful, free, open-source software – with lower effort and cost than ever before. As a bonus, you’ll also be avoiding some of the world’s worst tech companies and adding another barrier for snoops in law enforcement to hop over should they come after your data.

There are some bumps along the way if you stick with pure Open Source software, so there’s also detailed help on where to strategically used freemium, closed-source solutions like Google Docs to get maximum utility with the lowest cost and risk to your chapter.

This guide represents the path to a final state of a chapter’s digital infratructure — I’ve tried to cover as much as possible so there are no gaps in the tools organizers are asking for. It contains essential information for two main groups of people.

First, it’s designed to be a technical walkthrough so that anyone armed with a credit card and an internet connection can follow the instructions. There are not an overabundance of volunteers in any left org, let alone experienced systems administrators, so this guide is designed such that it can be executed by an org of any size, with any volunteer capacity, and with only basic technical skills.

The second purpose is to provide leadership an explanation of what these tools are, why they have been chosen instead of others, and how they will help your chapter make the world a better place. While still important for the tech folks to know, these sections will be of particular interest to those who will justify the costs of the software, use the software, convince others to switch to it, and so on.

Review the table of contents below to get an overview of all the topics we’ll be covering, or simply scroll down to begin.

Table of Contents

Requirements

Technical Requirements

You only need three major things to complete the vast majority of this guide. Click their names for an explanation, or jump below.

There are some other optional purchases throughout the guide.

There is no away around the fact that this solution — as with any open-source solution — is going to cost money, probably more than you spend on technology now. Big tech companies can subsidize free usage of things like Google Docs, OneDrive, Zoom, or Slack by charging their business customers a lot of money. This arrangement also means that many essential features, especially security features, are locked behind an enterprise paywall your chapter will never be able to afford.

But despite the cost of running free software, I think this is worth it to take control of your chapter — why become socialist if you don’t want to take big bets, eh? ????

The cost breakdown will look something like this:

This adds up to $440 per year (less than $10 a week), or more if you pay for Cloudron monthly. This is the cheapest possible configuration I could find that could reasonably support a chapter.

If your chapter has a very tech-savvy Linux expert on hand, you could probably get away with not paying for Cloudron, but remember — someday, someone else will need to inherit this technology stack. You might be unavailable when something breaks, and things like chat and email can be critical to people’s safety. Cloudron makes it easy to give multiple people access both to the platform itself and all the apps therein, and it included support from the Cloudron developers. That simplicity and peace of mind is a huge part of why Cloudron is worth the money.

Disclosure: The two links above for a VPS and Cloudron are referral links; if you purchase services after clicking on them, I get a discount on the VPS and license key used to run socialism.tools. Vultr gives you $100 to start, which is a great deal.

Organizational Requirements

Organizational requirements are harder to define than technical requirements as every organization is built differently. With any organization undergoing significant technological change, however, there are two solid principles to follow that I’ll outline below.

Firstly and most importantly: communicate. This is the most critical piece of the advice in this entire document, and arguably the hardest.

For the tech folks especially: Whoever wants to begin any process of techincal change must ensure that leadership is aware of what changes are being proposed, how it will affect the functioning of their work as leaders and the work of the membership at large, and so on. Communicating early and often with your leadership will be key, particularly with a long or complex project like this. Be concise, use plain language (keep technical languge to the mimimun needed for people to understand what is changing) and focus on what leadership cares about.

If leadership is struggling with the limitations of free versions of enterprise tools, don’t romanticize the open-source movement or talk about privacy — tell them about features or tools they can get by making the switch. Having specific examples of projects or needs that could benefit from the new tools is always a good idea – if you have comrades you know well on working groups or committees, ask them what their pain points are and what they need help with, then come up with a solution.

This may seem like common sense, but I have a lot of experience in this process (in the corporate sphere, at least), and it’s shocking what is regularly overlooked.

The second principle goes along with the first, and it is simply be honest. Don’t present the new solution as a magic wand – obviously, you should talk about what is does better, but you also need to talk about what might be worse.

Finding use cases in the chapter where the tools under-perform what was there previously might encourage you to look for alternatives during the scoping process and prevent re-work later. In the worst case, some groups will remain on old tools. This can be frustrating, but if you show people you are listening to them, they will likely be more receptive to trying the new program again when you find a solution. If you try to force or cajole them into using a solution that does not fit their needs, they will (rightfully) distrust you.

Part 1 — Foundations

Preparing your domain name

Preparing your VPS

Now we need somewhere to point that fancy new domain name! There are many options to choose from when selecting a company to provide you a VPS. Cloudron recommends four options that offer one-click easy installation.

Vultr is what I use, and is a popular option that offers one-click installation. It also has one of the best user interfaces available, to make managing your resources and sharing them with others easier. Digital Ocean is another popular alternative that offers slightly less performance per dollar, but has a wider variety of services built-in.

You can click here to set up a new Vultr account with $100 in credit. Once you have an account, you can create a new server using the plus button on the product page. Click Deploy new server, and then choose the location closest to you.

Under “Server Type” select “Marketplace apps” and select “Cloudron”.

Leave “Basic” selected and choose the size of your server. The absolute bare minimum is the $10/mo server and I wouldn’t recommend this unless you really, really don’t have any money. If you plan on installing more than two or three apps, especially if you want to use WordPress, I would strongly recommend going up to the $20 plan at a minimum.

Important: you can very easily upgrade your server, but downgrading is much more difficult.

Next, you’ll choose a data region. If you’re trying to avoid surveillance by the government by selecting a different country, I have bad news — it will not help. For performance reasons, choose a data center as close to your members as possible.

Select the checkboxes for IPv6 and Block storage. IPv6 is a new networking technology I see no reason not to have. Block storage will come in handy later for backup purposes; we’re not going to cover that here.

Leave everything else as-is, unless you want to pay for DDoS protection. I don’t think smaller orgs need this, but if it gives you some peace of mind, go for it.

Your server hostname can be set to something custom for vanity purposes, and you likely don’t need to worry about labels.

Congratulations! In a few moments, your VPS will be built and have Cloudron ready to go! Wait for the installation process to complete before moving on to the next step — configuring your new Cloudron install.

Cloudron Configuration

Once the process completes, click the IP address (those numbers) to copy it to your clipboard. Then paste the IP address into your browser’s URL bar and do not include http://www or anything else.

If you get a message saying the site is not secure, press “Advanced” and then “Continue” – you should only see this message when you first setup the server. You should see Cloudron’s DNS Setup page. We are now going to connect the domain name you created earlier to our server.

Type in your domain name, select Gandi, then API Token, and paste in the API token you saved to Notepad or Sticky Notes earlier in the Domain section. After a few moments, you should be prompted to create your Cloudron username and password. Your email must be valid – double check it!

After that, you’ll want to create a Cloudron.io account. This is the account you’ll use to pay for a license to Cloudron (or try it for free).

a very quick cloudron tour

Once you’re on the Cloudron dashboard, let’s take a moment to get familiar with it. Clicking your username in the top-left corner of the screen will open the menu. Feel free to add a new icon and some flavor text under Branding. Domains and Certs is where you can add more domains — this is helpful to manage a sub-project using the same infrastructure as the same site.

For example, if Albuquerque DSA has as Medicare for All action, they can register albqm4a.org and then add it to Cloudron to run their WordPress blog, email inboxes and so on. This can be a big cost-saver with multiple projects.

One quick note: If you are self-hosting Cloudron at home, enable DDNS on the Networking page.

You now have a solid foundation on which to continue building a suite of tools for your comrades. In the next section, we’ll start with the biggest tool first — Nextcloud, your open-source swiss army knife.