This is the first in a series of articles about La Contre-Voie’s 2024 fundraising campaign. In this article, we will introduce you our future digital service offering.
Over the past few years, we’ve been constantly receiving requests to set up digital services that meet very common needs for collectives: from website hosting to a Nextcloud in order to manage files shared across an organization (not just a personal account), to a newsletter service…
Until now, we could only redirect these collectives to other ethical hosts, as we were unable to meet this demand.
But very soon, this is going to change: since the beginning of 2024, we’ve been preparing a new range of services to equip associations and individuals!
We are currently testing these services in real-life conditions with local associations, and we hope to officially open most of these services to the public during 2025, if you give us the means.
In the meantime… here’s the list!
The following services will be subject to pricing (more on this below). They have all been under experiment with associations for several months.
We can host a website created with WordPress, the world’s most widely used website creation software, or as a “static” site (S3 bucket) by uploading the raw website files.
For the time being, we don’t plan to help with the design of the website: we only take care of the hosting.
The complete alternative to Google Suite, with tools for creating forms, surveys, calendars and shared files, and a collaborative Office document editor.
Unlike our current Nextcloud service, each structure will be able to create an account for each member of their organization.
With the Paheko software, which we’ve been using for our own accounting since 2019, you can keep the accounts of an association or a micro-business without fearing for your personal data, and in an interface that (really) makes you want to do the accounting.
To host your videos, we suggest PeerTube as an ethical alternative to YouTube.
The application can also be used to broadcast live video. The platform we set up will be shared by all our beneficiaries.
Our three historic member-only services (Mail, Git and Nextcloud) won’t be changing much, but will rather receive improvements over time.
A mailbox hosted with us, rather than with Gmail: our mail service is growing and improving, with a new webmail now available. We now have about fifty domain names registered on our service, 360 mailboxes and almost 1600 redirects.
Because we want to democratize the use of ethical e-mail as much as possible, this service will always be included in the membership, including the personalized domain name.
We’re also working on new services that will require a registration (by creating a free account on our platform).
We haven’t yet decided which software and services we’ll host, but we’re considering the following tools:
Implementation of these services in 2025 is less guaranteed than à la carte services, as they meet lower-priority needs and we still have a few technical prerequisites to overcome.
Among the new features we’re working on, we’re designing an applications portal to replace our current members’ area.
This portal will bring together all applications, with or without registration, those intended for our members and the “à la carte” services to which the user has access.
You can find the portal code here!
The future applications portal (work in progress!).
Our biggest technical project, once completed, should improve your ease of use: you’ll now have just one account to access all the applications we offer.
This little magic trick is made possible by the SSO software Keycloak, and should make it much easier to navigate from one application to another. All you’ll have to remember is a single login and password!
For our part, this represents a huge amount of work to migrate existing data, currently locked away on a small piece of software written by ourselves in 2019. We’ll report on our technical adventures in a future article.
For “à la carte” services: we hope to officially open all these services during 2025, if we can overcome the technical challenges that this service offering poses for us, and if you give us the financial means.
For the services for registered users: this will depend on how much time we have! They could arrive in 2025, but it’s not out of the question to wait until 2026.
This new service offering has nothing to do with the tools we currently maintain, which is why we need a full-time employee to take care of it:
So, if we don’t raise enough money to pay someone full-time to deal with these issues, it’s possible that the release of these services will be postponed, because we can’t afford to launch new services without making sure we’re in a position to maintain them.
We’re under no illusions: we’re a small association, and we don’t have the reputation or resources of Framasoft, so we don’t expect to gather enough donations to cover a full-time minimum wage for one person to maintain the entire offering - barring an exceptional sponsor, that would be nice, but we’re not particularly counting on that!…
For example, we cannot offer a service equivalent to Frama.space without financial compensation, as the technical costs and maintenance time involved would be too high for La Contre-Voie to bear.
So we’re going to diversify our sources of income by offering services “à la carte” on condition of an annual financial contribution to cover part of the costs, at a reasonable price. For example:
These rates are in addition to the annual fee (for a collective: 30 euros per year) and are adapted to the storage level chosen.
The other rates have not yet been fully established, as we still need a little time.
We have, however, agreed special conditions of use for this “à la carte” service, which you can find here.
Registration-based services (that does not need an annual subscription) will be entirely free to use, financed by your donations and our other sources of income.
Making a decent living and offering affordable rates is a complex equation, isn’t it?
Fortunately, we have a solution that should suit small associations that don’t have the means to pay for these services: the introduction of solidarity rates to adapt to the means of structures in need, and relying on donations to cover this reduction in rates; because if we offer a reduction, the price difference falls on our shoulders and has to be financed by other means.
In this way, we hope to cover our financial needs without causing harm to small associations who might need our tools.
We’ll have more to say about our pricing policy in a later article.
Thank you for reading, and see you next week for a new article!