Memorandum

1. Executive Summary & Pilot Scope

This revised memorandum serves as an exploratory discussion draft to establish a bounded, pragmatic pilot for evaluating community-governed video conferencing infrastructure within the National Technology Committee (NTC). To ensure operational continuity, this proposal applies strictly to synchronous video/audio meeting tools used for internal NTC working group sessions—not asynchronous coordination, documentation tools, or org-wide mandates.

Given the volunteer-led nature of our work, any technological shift must balance democratic ethics with the material constraints of our members. Rather than an abrupt national transition, this proposal outlines an opt-in NTC pilot designed to benchmark volunteer maintenance overhead, test accessibility and user onboarding, and provide empirical findings for the broader organization without creating organizational silos^[1].

2. Problem Statement: Digital Sovereignty & Corporate Dependency

Our ongoing reliance on corporate communication infrastructure presents significant long-term organizational risks. Proprietary platforms concentrate essential organizing utilities within commercial entities whose commercial terms of service, telemetry harvesting, and vendor lock-in are fundamentally unaccountable to democratic membership. While earlier forum conversations explored Google Meet as a low-friction interim tool due to its browser-based WebRTC accessibility, lateral moves between corporate ecosystems do not resolve the structural hazard of digital enclosure.

Within this proposal, "digital sovereignty" carries an explicit operational definition: ensuring that meeting access logs, member identity records, and session data remain under the stewardship of our democratic organization rather than corporate entities subject to external administrative control or compliance shifts. While DSA utilizes licensed, paid tiers of commercial platforms like Zoom rather than free tiers, paid licensing introduces recurring budgetary dependencies and centralized credential bottlenecks. Exploring community-stewarded alternatives is therefore a prudent investment in our operational independence.

This critique draws on cooperative traditions of voluntary association and self-emancipation. Thinkers within historical labor networks and early cooperative movements demonstrated that lasting political autonomy requires direct ownership of the instruments of coordination^[2]. Digital tools are the modern equivalent of cooperative halls; maintaining control over them protects the integrity of our organizing spaces.

3. Addressing Usability, Maintenance & Governance

Previous proposals for open-source adoption have frequently faltered by underestimating administrative labor or downplaying user experience. This proposal establishes concrete safeguards to address those challenges directly:

• Accounting for Volunteer Sysadmin Labor: Deploying self-hosted, federated communication stacks (such as self-hosted Matrix/Synapse paired with dedicated Jitsi instances) creates substantial ongoing maintenance, security patching, and uptime monitoring responsibilities. Given that our members contribute labor on a part-time basis around work and family commitments, this pilot will first evaluate movement-aligned, managed infrastructure—such as instances hosted by non-profit cooperatives like May First Movement Technology^[3]—before considering resource-intensive self-hosted deployments.
• Prioritizing User Accessibility over "Jank": Software friction is not a badge of honor; it is an active barrier to democratic participation, especially for non-technical members and comrades requiring assistive technologies. Any platform evaluated during the pilot must satisfy baseline usability criteria: reliable low-bandwidth performance, mobile browser compatibility without forced account creation, telephone dial-in access, and automated live transcription/captioning.
• Democratic Governance vs. Open-Source Licensing: Source-available code is not inherently democratically managed; many open-source projects operate under corporate steerage or open-core commercial models. This initiative explicitly seeks platforms stewarded by democratic non-profit foundations, worker cooperatives, or movement partners committed to transparency and shared ownership.
• Preventing Organizational Siloing: The NTC cannot organize in isolation from the wider organization. To ensure cross-committee collaboration remains seamless, all pilot meetings will maintain bidirectional bridge links and calendar notifications that integrate cleanly with general membership workflows, with guaranteed fallback procedures to ensure no guest or collaborator is ever locked out.

4. Phased Evaluation Roadmap (120-Day Plan)

Recognizing the finite capacity of volunteer labor, this process rejects abrupt cutoffs in favor of a measured, 4-phase exploratory cycle:

1. Phase 1: Working Group Formation & Requirements Audit (Days 1–30) Convene an exploratory working group of interested NTC members; draft technical evaluation criteria (bandwidth requirements, dial-in support, captioning); audit active recurring NTC calendar links on discussion.dsausa.org.
2. Phase 2: Sandbox Benchmarking & Infrastructure Assessment (Days 31–60) Test trial instances of Jitsi and compatible tools hosted by movement-aligned providers; calculate required monthly volunteer maintenance hours; prepare non-technical onboarding guides and troubleshooting cheatsheets.
3. Phase 3: Controlled Working Group Pilot (Days 61–90) Run select, voluntary NTC subcommittee meetings on the test platform; provide dual-access links (with standard Zoom fallback links) to collect immediate user feedback on audio/video reliability and onboarding ease.
4. Phase 4: Synthesis & Governance Recommendations (Days 91–120) Review user feedback, technical uptime logs, and volunteer labor expenditure; publish an empirical findings report to the NTC forum and Steering Committee detailing whether long-term adoption or further cross-national coordination is feasible.