As a pilot member of Chattanooga.Digital you have access to our new Nextcloud instance: Cloud.Chattanooga.Digital! It gives us a way to collaborate, communicate, store and share files, and more online, along with your private space. 

You should have received an invitation to set a password in the last few days. If not, check your junk mail folder. If it's there, please mark it as "not junk." If not, let us know and we will resend it. 

There are numerous applications that can be accessed via Nextcloud. Our instance has ones that are oriented to running Chattanooga.Digital that you can use them for your own purposes: 

• Files and Photos – your personal spaces to store and share files and photo. Files have version tracking and recycle bin. Photos and videos can be assembled in albums and shared.
• Talk – meet online or text chat with others in the browser... or use the Talk app on your computer or phone! We will use this for coop meetings.
• Office – create and collaborate on diagrams, documents, spreadsheets, and slides directly in the browser. There's also a whiteboard!
• Calendar and appointments – personal and shared calendars and an app for others to schedule time with you.
• Contacts – a directory for the coop with member profiles; you control what others see.
• Mail – use Nextcloud to read your email (email account not included).
• Deck – basic issue/task tracking with Gantt or kanban views. We're using this to coordinate work on the coop.
• Collectives – shared pages for notes and documentation that outlive a chat thread, basically a wiki.
• Forms, Polls, and Tables – tools for gathering and managing structured data.

All of this is open source software that we own, running on servers that we control. Your apps and data are YOURS! It is just one of the apps Chattanooga.Digital will provide to members. No giant tech companies involved!

We are still figuring out how to manage and use Nextcloud, including what apps to provide to everyone. At this stage we are getting our systems set up, looking for folks who want to be community builders and tech facilitators, and planning to establish the coop as a separate corporation early next year. Any help or input you might provide will be greatly appreciated! 

Specifically, as mentioned in other emails... and I'll send a separate one... we are establishing a software evaluation process and evaluating identity and access management (IAM) software in the process. IAM will give members single sign-on to Nextcloud and multiple other apps and provide a digital identity to log into other services without giving your data to tech companies.

As we move past the pilot phase, the plan is to establish shared Nextcloud instances for individual members (personal use) and organizational members (business/work use) and provide private Nextcloud instances for an additional fee. Your accounts will be migrated to the new instances if you want to keep using Nextcloud.

Let us know what you think!