# Directions Forward I've tried out a lot of the available software options over the last couple weeks, and to me it seems like an awful lot of how to proceed comes down to the timeline of the neighborhood survey and how much technical capital we really have to invest in the effort. Firstly, though, we need some kind of name for this. I [asked about it](https://ep-tech-talk.mn.co/posts/7719458?utm_source=manual) a few days ago, and hopefully a name already exists and I'm just out of the loop. *Something* needs to be given to people on the surveys, and that same thing needs to be used for sites and subdomains and other online pages. ## Mighty Networks The quickest and easiest thing to get set up and working for 90% of our needs (as far as I can see, anyway) is this platform. If the desire is to get some introductory documents up on a landing page and have people get into conversations without a lot of fuss or muss, this fits the bill. This is especially true if people keep using WhatsApp for emergency messaging in the foreseeable future. ## Nextcloud The [Nextcloud](https://nextcloud.com) platform offers a *ton* of different modules that I could see being organizationally useful. Video/audio/text chats, calendars, maps, web pages, and countless other integrations. It took some fiddling to get it installed, and it was a bit slow with everything running on my old RPi, but it was pretty slick to use. The experience would likely be far better if it were self-hosted on a VPS or one of the turn-key Nextcloud providers was used. This would be my preferred solution for the long haul *if* we have the time/funding/tech resources to get it set up properly. ## A La Carte (and/or FreedomBox) The most flexible solution would be to select individual services that meet specific needs. For example, I've been chatting with Troy using Element/Matrix, and it works just fine. It even supports some interesting "bridging" options that should allow us to connect it to WhatsApp groups, and thus give us a migration strategy for those people. Similarly, people could use something like [GitHub Pages](https://pages.github.com/) to create the pages for a web site (or use MediaWiki as provided by FreedomBox). There are all sort of little things we can get working together, with a bit of downside being that it might take a lot more time and effort than we have at the moment. For example, FreedomBox itself installed easily, but the individual services weren't actually configured to integrate all that well, and it sucked up a lot of my time trying to determine exactly how it changed the RPi's network access so that I could even *reach* the box to use its services. ## Conclusion Given as much as / as little as I know, I really think Mighty Networks is the way to go right now. It might be suitable for years and years (especially if they keep adding features), but I'd go in with the expectation that it likely might be replaced in a year or two with something like Nextcloud or individual open source services. Still, I say bootstrap up with Mighty Networks. Other perspectives would be welcome. 3a4ccecb815c873bfce1df05bd951d22050f824008158763fec3ed9999f6c2df