If you’d like to participate and share research, you can sign up for an account here on the CoSocial Discourse forum.
On social media, please use the tag #ElbowsUpTech — we’ll use the same tag here in the forum to collect info elbowsuptech
We have some existing pages like Canadian Tech Service Providers:
And one highlighting co-ops:
You can start by introducing yourself in this discussion thread, including a tech service you are looking for or a Canadian offering you have to suggest.
We’ll likely have some group calls, split off dedicated work for certain types of services (eg email providers), and generally share a promote what we find.
Glad I found this. Have a number of clients in the Canadian legal space that are increasingly expressing interest in moving away from US providers. Tough to find an on-par equivalent for providers like Cloudflare or DigitalOcean but very much on the hunt.
I am going to zombie this thread here, and add some new thoughts to this idea that might further extend how CoSocial can engage in some outreach and maybe consulting with Canadian businesses and NFPs who want to get on board with their own ownership of all-Canadian social web services.
I had an interview this morning for a contract role in an NFP looking at digital transformation, and then a great conversation with the CEO of the Waterloo Regional Community Foundation in the afternoon. The latter started with a focus on my feedback specifically on their trial of an AI agent for locating information on event and gathering spaces (TL;DR: stop that crap, it’s just spewing slop) but morphed into discussion of how we can better integrate or re-integrate online social communications with real-world communities that have a purpose in mind beyond just adopting new tech for tech’s sake.
A big barrier cited by both orgs is the perceived lack of all-Canadian, and/or localizable-to-Canadian-communities, infrastructure and tools to do what their communities need, as either pan-Canadian specialist organizations, or more general but hyper-local community boosters. A second one, which we are well aware of and slowly starting to overcome is the perceived maturity and stability of services like Mastodon, but we have some momentum on those and I think we’re reaching a point where the infrastructure and expertise for integrating, hosting, and community management is more the barrier than is a “new”, not-big-tech-Corporate, platform.
I wonder if there’s space for us to partner with something like Fedihost or other lower-level Canadian infrastructure providers and to start planning and developing a curated framework of community hosting options that would be packages and partnerships we could promote for organizations among our membership. If CoSocial organizational membership brought with it potential to direct our members’ IT, communications, and promotional budgets TO CoSocial-managed development and support contracts, it seems to me we have a potential revenue stream and even a training and employment incubator to connect individual members who might want contractor-portfolio IT work with organizational members looking for digital transformation support without the massive consulting fees or in-house IT budgets. As an organization, we’ve so far limited ourselves to some sandboxes to play in and one flagship Mastodon server, but I’m seeing a lot of signals that there are, in an oncoming storm, some real opportunities to build a sustainable B2B social technology service provider.
That said, I’m a tech who’s used to somehow connecting square wires into round holes and nonetheless making a system perform what a user needs - so I’m throwing this idea around hoping there are social enterprise finance and management folks around who can better fill out other details and offer some constructive feedback.