On Tue, Nov 29, 2022 at 7:37 PM Stewart C. Russell via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
On 27/11/2022 21.01, Evan Leibovitch via talk wrote:

Along with other AGM business, we will be discussing how GTALUG goes forward with our online services.
I'm glad we're going to have this discussion. Chris Browne's untimely passing two years ago showed how heavily GTALUG relied on the work of a very few volunteers. And we do have a lot of online services, including:
  • the website;
  • the mailing lists and their various archives. Maintaining and moderating a mailing list is no trivial thing;
  • GTALUG Wiki — https://wiki.gtalug.org/start — which I don't think anyone's touched for over two years.

It might be worth re-evaluating what resources we need. Could we make do with a hosted WordPress instance and move the lists to groups.io?

All ideas are welcomed.

Anything we host ourselves bears both admin resources and financial hosting cost. Right now we're using mailman and frankly, I see the bounce messages and it's almost impossible to keep track of.
(Hint: I tried mailing this Sunday night but that bounced). I really don't  like mailman anymore. There are better ways to filter spam.

Is GTALUG Inc a qualifying non-profit?

Yes. We've already been vetted by TechSoup *and* approved by Google. In fact we've had access to the Google nonprofit package for almost a year and could move things over to it at any time. The discussion at hand is whether we want to start really using it.

What happens when Google decides to stop providing this free service?

Google had indeed been known to axe products and projects that didn't pan out as they'd hoped (I particularly mourn the loss of Google Cardboard and Google Reader). Google for Nonprofits is unlikely to be one of them; it's actually very popular. A great many NPOs -- some of which are household names -- depend on that service. And with Alphabet being as insanely profitable as it is, the company is unlikely to jettison its primary CSR tool.

That said, I'm in no position to guarantee anything.

Where does our data go? “If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold.”*

In this case, it's not the case.

When you use basic personal GMail and Google Docs, you are most certainly giving up privacy in return for "free" services. But that's not what's on offer here. We have access to Google Workplace (formerly known as G Suite) which is the commercial service that businesses use as a subscription-based productivity suite. In return for companies paying for Google Workplace, the company does not scan your data and it's subject to both Canadian and European privacy laws (after all, the apps themselves are pretty much the same as the free ones, what Workplace customers are paying for is privacy and support). What GTALUG has is a no-cost commercial license for Google Workplace (as well as other stuff including $10K worth of Google search advertising per month). So we have access to the commercial non-snooped service at no cost.

- Evan