Online services available for NZOSS members, organisations, and individuals
Open source digital productivity and collaboration tools are available to you, whether you're a social enterprise, school, sole trader, or something else!
The NZOSS makes a number of online services available for our members—and the broader New Zealand community—to use. They provide a showcase of free and open source (FOSS) software tools (more recently, we've started referring to them as "LibreSoftware"). Many use subdomains of our original NZOSS domain name, but as our organisation's brief has expanded beyond purely software, we've adopted a new brand, Iridescent, which we believe celebrates the fact that diversity of colours are also beautiful! Have an explore and let us know if you'd like to try some of these!
Information and advocacy
NZOSS website
This website, https://nzoss.nz/. It's used to provide info to the community and acts as a historical store of information - it's been upgraded from Drupal 4.7, back in 2008 or 2009. This iteration is built on the Drupal 9 (recently upgraded to Drupal 10) web application/CMS framework.
Many thanks to Carl Klitscher for his heroic work doing the really hard upgrade from Drupal 6->Drupal 8!
Open Standards
https://openstandards.nz - our case (and online petition) to convince the NZ government that open standards for software procurement should be mandated across all government agencies. (also a Drupal site)
Software Patents
https://softwarepatents.org.nz - our previous online petition calling on the NZ government to block the patenting of computer software in this jurisdiction. This successful effort is online for historical purposes, and to assist other countries who are mounting similar domestic efforts to block software from patentability. (yet another Drupal site)
Communication tools
Chat
https://chat.nzoss.nz - our Rocket.Chat-based messaging platform (which is functionally similar to other rich messaging tools like Slack, Yammer, Mattermost, Riot, and others). We have channels for lots of different tech-specific interest groups - if there's one you'd like to see that's missing, we'll create it! We work with communities of interest - that's FOSS all over. Just sign up to take part!
We've more recently moved most of our chat a more complex but much more powerful messaging platform, Matrix (with a Synapse server and Element client) at https://chat.iridescent.nz
Micro-blogging
https://mastodon.nzoss.nz - our Mastodon instance (the longest running in Aotearoa NZ, started in 2017), join us and become part of the Fediverse. Mastodon is a free, non-corporate, distributed social network with some superficial similarities to Twitter.
Video sharing & streaming
https://peertube.iridescent.nz - our new (as of 9/25) instance of Peertube (a distributed, open source, Fediverse-enabled video hosting platform comparable in many ways to YouTube), is now accepting new users (applications are moderated to limit spam).
Community sharing & building
https://friendica.iridescent.nz - our new (as of 3/25) instance of Friendica (a community sharing platform reminiscent of Facebook) is accepting new users (applications are moderated to limit spam).
Video conferencing
https://talk.iridescent.nz is a BigBlueButton instance. It is a large-scale video conferencing and presentation platform, supporting many participants and other useful capabilities like participant chat, sharing desktops, presentations, an interactive virtual "whiteboard", recording meetings, and more. Our older system, https://bbb.nzoss.nz , has also been upgraded to the latest version of BBB, and all historical recordings continue to be available to its users.
Community forum
https://community.iridescent.nz is a Discourse instance that provides a place for communities-of-interest in NZ to discuss topics of mutual passion in an ad hoc way - just define a new topic! Anyone can sign up, no cost. Recent topics include: video security systems, home automation, open data, meetups going virtual, online education practices, working from home... Add your own!
Collaboration tools
Software version control
https://git.nzoss.nz - our GitLab instance, making it easier for FOSS developers here in New Zealand to collaborate. GitLab is similar in many ways to other Git-based forges, like Github.com and Bitbucket.org, although unlike those, it is LibreSoftware/FOSS. Use of this system is a perk of NZOSS financial membership!
Document storage and creation
https://hub.iridescent.nz - our NextCloud and Collabora (online, collaborative LibreOffice) and (in 2019) Only Office instances (since 2022 we've shut down the Collabora instance in favour of the OnlyOffice which is just much more polished). This combination - functionally similar to Google Docs + Google Drive or MS Office 365 + MS OneDrive but entirely LibreSoftware - has succeeded our (now retired) concurrent collaborative editing solution, an Etherpad-Lite instance.
To limit spam, you'll need to request an account to access this service.
Passwords/Secrets management
https://safe.nzoss.nz is a BitWarden instance, providing a cross-device synchronised password management system. At present, it is invite-only and will likely be a NZOSS-member-only service. Our instance does not use BitWarden's server code, as it depends on proprietary Microsoft technologies which would pollute our systems. Instead, we use a fully Free and Open Source reimplementation called Vaultwarden. See this howto for more information on Bitwarden and our implementation of it - you can also use this approach to easily create you own (we recommend it!).
Event management
In February 2022, we set up https://events.iridescent.nz, an instance of Mobilizon, which aims to replace Facebook (and other centralised proprietary services like Meetup.com) as a user friendly way of coordinating and publicising events (real and virtual) and managing participation. It's a distributed platform, which means that various Mobilizon instances operate independently, but can be federated - if you have an account on one instance, you can use that account to find out about - and participate in - events going on across the whole network based on where you are in the world. Our instance is not yet set-up for public registration, but if you'd like to explore it, let us know!
Social reading
https://read.iridescent.nz is an instance of Bookwyrm, a Fediverse platform that allows people to list books they've read and review them for others, or browse the same from others.
Monitoring Tools
Because of rightly increasing scrutiny on the practices of Google with its formerly ubiquitous Google Analytics, many people want to try LibreSoftware alternatives, so we set up two, Matomo and Plausible, for testing. After a trial, we've settled on Matomo, and are considering another, newer, platform, Umami for a trial.
Matomo
Originally called Piwik, Matomo is a comprehensive, mature website analytics tool whose development has been led from Aotearoa NZ for many years. Most web platforms provide easy integration.
These services are available for members - if you'd want to try either of them, let us know!
To flesh our our monitoring needs, we've got Uptime Kuma and Beszel:
Uptime Kuma
We want to be able to trace whether or not our services are running (and be warned of it if not!), so we set up an instance of the superb LibreSoftware tool, Uptime Kuma, which does a great job of tracking things and providing alerts of small problems so we have a chance of keeping them from becoming big problems. If you want access to this member-only service for your own websites or online services, get in touch!
Beszel
We want to know how our various Virtual Private Servers (which host all of these services) are doing, all the time. Ideally, we want to be warned about things likes servers running out of RAM or being bogged down by backups or running out of disk space before it becomes a real problem. That's what Beszel does for us. It's easy to set up on each VPS, and gives us a 'dashboard' with summarised info, as well as a quick-to-check green-yellow-red light system to indicate all is well, warning, and emergency states!
Acknowledgements
We can bring these services to you thanks to generous sponsored Aotearoa-based hosting services provided by Prodigi (in the past we had sponsorship from Catalyst Cloud and Rimu Hosting), and thanks to NZOSS volunteer system administrators and dev-ops people.
We have other tools waiting in the wings, and will add them to the list when they're up and running.