Hi Librehosters, it has been a while. I have been rather silent here and at chatons’ lately.
With Nubo we have been quite busy with raising funds and preparing the groundwork of the project, hoping to have the services ready for end of this summer.
One big construction area within the project is on the legal side. I am hoping to find some building material here in the network. Maybe you have experience to share on that? Do you think the legal documents of your structures could be helpful for us to look at? Be it your standart contracts with clients, or legal agreements with partners you are sharing infrastructure with for example… but also your terms of service and privacy policies of course.
Don’t hesitate to point me on aspects we might not think of but should!
At Nubo we hope that the TOS (and maybe other documents) will be written in a collaborative process with the members/users. Does anyone here have experience with something alike?
I have proposed that the ToS of p.s.: be written collaboratively, but so far nobody wished to participate. Here’s the history if you like to see:
The interesting thing is that nobody gives a damn until something happens and we need it. I guess it’s a culture in the making. But I would not be too enthusiastic about making it a collective process. There are legal obligations, and then a capitalist strategy of capture of user-generated value, or on the contrary a strategy of protection of the users. We know where we stand. I’m sorry we did not find the resources and enthusiasm to get this done, and I hope you will.
Hey. I would not say that our documents are an example to follow as I made those as I best as I could… You can find those here: https://indie.host/legals (in french).
We have contracted a lawyer to help us on improving those documents, when its done I’ll let you know, some parts should be reusable by any librehosters (i guess).
Thanks for opening this thread - I found it quite useful to share experiences for this topic. In the case of Cloud68.co we asked for permission from Digital Ocean and remixed our ToS based on our needs, we also remixed some of the content from Indie.Host (many thanks!) You can find the end result here: https://cloud68.co/legal/terms-of-service. With the legal entity planned to also be legally in Estonia in 2020, we will need to review some of the content in Q4 2020.
In general, asking for legal advice just like @unteem mentioned in the case of Indie.Host is the right way to go, although I understand that that are costs associated with this that in many cases can’t be avoided, unless you have a good friend that wants to help. Another way of going with this would be to share the costs and efforts between us. Obviously this would require some kind of coordination between some or all of the members here to share the costs.
Sharing the costs of legal documents seems difficult since there are so many different situations according to the countries and legal forms. But it could be interesting to involve specialists such as eDRI. Is there an eDRI member around?
+1, it’s not easy to handle and find a solution. Approaching eDRI is a good idea. If there aren’t eDRI members around do you think we/I can contact them to point them to this thread and ask for their opinion?
thanks for this, i’ll give it a read, and hopefully be able to use some parts too for our collective if you don’t mind…(?).
we recently had an incident with some new “customer” that only cared to get an account on our hosting server to try to extract info/data from another client, so we were thinking about publishing a ToS as well… even written -in our own words- a small draft. (still in progress…)
we took advice from a friend (lawandtech.eu) about the incident, but haven’t consulted him about the ToS yet. if needed we can seek advice there as well, as we’ve been “trading” tech support, for law advices/services…
Feel free to remix our ToS as they are in a permissive license.
The incident with your ‘client’ sounds nasty and in my (non legal) advice you should definitely ask a professional legal person to follow through it.
lawandtech.eu seems quite interesting. If you have a good experience with them please do share it here. We are quite interested in having a partner that understands what we are doing and how we do it.
In the meantime, with Nubo we lounched a process with our members to co-create the TOS we want to agrée on. Starting with a document that used parts of the TOS of Indie.host, Framasoft, Cassiopea and Disroot we ask our members for review, input, feedback… So far the collaboration was by writing and by one online workshop on big blue button. We also have a legal advisor to review the result.
We agreed on a first version in the general assembly this week (I’ll post it here when we it’s online but it’s french and dutch). But the collective process is only at it’s start, we will work on a version that gives more time for implication to the members. Hopefully with IRL meetings this time. Next year’s general assembly should present a new version…
It’s a really exciting process which demands quite some energy. But it’s worth it to build the community of users/co-owners we want for our cooperative.