While working remotely from one side of an ocean for a company on the
other side of said ocean, I refined my views regarding communication
infrastructures. We didn't implement all of these practices, partly
because my concern for freedom of culture was stronger than that of
my colleagues.
## Replacing WordPress
### Static web hosting
I don't know what we're using Wordpress for. If it's just doing static
web hosting, we can use any number of static blog generators and host
it
on any number of web servers. I happen to write mine in Nanoc and host
it
on GitHub, but the Free Culture Foundation might prefer a more free
host.
http://nanoc.ws
http://thomaslevine.com
https://github.com/tlevine/www.thomaslevine.com
It should be easy to put a static site on our existing server, which I
think is from Gandi. NearlyFreeSpeech is another relatively free host.
https://www.gandi.net
https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net
That said, I'm more okay with using relatively proprietary hosts for
static hosting because switching is easy.
### The mailing list substitutes for blogs
I neither wrote nor read the blogs very much, but we do seem to use the
mailing list, and I feel like that's enough. I have yet to find a
mailing
list that I prefer over Mailman.
(Part of this might come from legal issues of minor relevance.
Companies
might be reluctant to make it easy for spam bots to send emails, so
they
limit the capabilities of the mailing list's administrators or require
strong verification that the list members want to be on the list.)
### Blog or wiki
Branchable looks awesome. You can edit either in the website or
locally,
by checking out a git repository. It's free software as far as I can
tell.
http://www.branchable.com/
I suggested this to my colleagues, but we wound up using a GitHub wiki.
## Avoiding Google Hangouts
People who play video games have had awesome voice communication for
quite a while. Ignoring video and a particular bug, Mumble was way
better
in every way I could think of than Skype and Google Hangouts. The
particular bug was that it crashes if you are use it with a USB headset
and then unplug the headset.
We can get cheap hosting at MumbleBoxes.
http://mumble.sourceforge.net/
http://www.mumbleboxes.com/
Mumble allows text communications, but IRC might be nicer for that,
especially if we found a nice web client. We used Grove, mainly
for the private rooms, but I mention it because it has a bunch of
nice webby features for people who don't won't install an IRC client
and log all everything that happens in the IRC room.
https://grove.io/
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