Tools and Services

Email, mailing lists, collaborative editing and cloud, websites, monitoring and management of online communities, e-learning, teleconferences, secure and anonymous browsing, search engine, wikis and publications, shared infrastructure, collective intelligence method and valuation of networks, etc. These everyday communication components of a network or organization have many partners in the world of open standards and open source software.

Dunia promotes, shares and hosts a variety of tools for those who actively experience IT diversity and online exchange, while participating in the non-monopolistic, non-exclusive and open use of electronic networks. This diversity is both an asset and a complexity that has to be understood. Therefore, it is necessary to facilitate its mediation towards networks and users.

Dunia is a signatory of the World Charter of Free Media. Managing an online communication platform implies ethics in interdependency and responsibility: joining with similar initiatives and seeking synergies with other social campaigns, including that of free software; developing partnerships that can accompany the appropriation of tools, generating experiments and skills that can be shared more widely; being transparent about functioning, source code and electronic resources used; guaranteeing the integrity and protection of users’ data; respecting international legal frameworks, especially the recent GDPR in Europe (and also the IT and Freedoms Law and the Law for Trust in the Digital Economy in French territory where the servers are hosted.)

Technologies

Technically, the Dunia platform is based on: :

• A physical infrastructure, specifically three dedicated servers (two production servers and one storage server), located in France and leased from the company OVH (the annual hosting cost is approximately €6500); the company Gandi is the registrar of some of the domain names used and Open Computación hosts a virtual server within another infrastructure.
• Virtual servers (around thirty) based on ProxMox, OpenVZ, KVM and LXC technologies, deployed in the three physical servers.
• A set of open source software programmes (see below), developed by the communities of technicians and offered under free license (GNU, GPL, AGPL, etc.)

These services are offered free of charge or to benefit actors who pursue common goals and with whom we have agreements and associations. In the current stage of the platform, some services are not open to the general public.

Forms of Collaboration

• Entering the project: More than a communication tool, Dunia is an actor positioned in the schools of thought about world transformations, exploring strategies of change in relation to many networks. Communication is inseparable from its experience, its proposals and its transforming action. Hence our efforts to grasp projects and promote dialogue between the means of communication and the goals pursued. This is not a “compulsory step” that hinders the rapid, concrete implementation of tools. It is above all a question of having the necessary sensitivity and orientation to enrich exchanges with our partners.

• Variable geometries: Each organization has unique infodiversity and needs. Dunia can provide infrastructure (virtual server), carry out and support information management, dedicate or share a particular service. It all depends on the nature and needs of the projects, but also on the limitations imposed by the nature of the platform. In general, some tools are distributed on virtual servers, isolated from each other to guarantee their stability and reduce their multiplication in parallel (economy of scale). On the user side, personalization takes place particularly at the level of interfaces, settings and virtual domains. Preliminary experimentation with the tools is one of the first steps taken with the new users.

• User control and sovereignty: The network of networks formed by the Internet is going through a moment of reterritorialization, for better (reappropriation) or for worse (fragmentation). Like other platforms, Dunia fosters the reappropriation of electronic resources while favouring the singularity of the network: access for administrators to make a security copy of data (through a dedicated storage server), promotion of open source software and open standards, transparency, respect for privacy and neutrality of services. The server hosting company (OVH) also provides transparency criteria, which show room for improvement, but which are ethically correct in the digital hosting market.

• Technical responsibilities and limitations: Given that the platform is limited in size (in human terms and in digital resources), we strive to respond to requests in as much as our commitments and time allow. The variety of uses of the tools and their personalization go hand in hand with a common policy to harmonize forms of use. For now, we have not prioritized the documentation of each service allocated to administrators and users. The documentation generated to date is mostly internal and is related to the monitoring of collaborations and general administration. The general conditions of use are at the draft stage.

• Accumulation and learning: Each request and operation is subject to technical supervision under a task administrator (based on the Redmine software). This method is decisive for technical tracking and to maintain learning over time.

• Technical maintenance and monitoring: Methodological experimentation and the identification of new tools are some of the platform’s aims. The updating of the services source code guarantees security conditions and scalability. Our response capacity to technical incidents is, in general, satisfactory, facilitated by security technologies (virtualization, redundancy of Raid discs, monitoring through Zabbix).