Building a collective Data Centre

It is common that free/open source software collectives have issues for hosting their projects. Many of them just choose to externalize them, hosting them in foreign companies that offer such services. The ones that choose to keep their projects in their own servers (such as Comunes), face problems, continuous efforts and costs associated to high-bandwidth connections, hardware replacement, attacks, spam, QoS, etc. That’s why we decided to associate with other similar social initiatives in order to build a collective data centre for all of us, and such data centre is becoming a reality now.

Minka (which means “work in favor of the whole community” in Quechua) is the umbrella that groups the Free Software cooperatives Xsto.info, Free Software Seed and the nonprofit Comunes (and hopefully soon SinDominio). We will handle this common data centre, with multiple aims: to share and socialize resources among initiatives with similar values, reducing external dependencies, share management, be open to others, have control over servers, to be flexible in conditions in space and time… summing up efforts and dividing the costs equally.

Technically, we are deploying a Content Delivery Network, which should optimize the use of the servers, reduce the delay for the users, and increase the virtual bandwidth. The physical space is located in Spain, and this initiative is open to any other initiative with similar values (local and foreign), in different degrees of involvement. The idea is that the more initiatives join, the less each one pays, and the more efficient is the CDN and shared maintenance. Therefore, if you are interested, just contact us!

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