Shifting to Open Source Workspace: What Happens When Big Tech Service Providers No Longer Align with Our Purpose?

While being a purpose-driven organisation feels great and unites us within Dala, implementing our purpose and values is, well, inconvenient. It means we have to test everything we do to examine how it contributes to our purpose of conducting high-quality research, evaluation, and technical assistance that integrate social-environmental dimensions and amplify diverse Global South voices, fostering fairness and equity. Our metrics of testing are often our values of the dignity the people and nature, which compels us toward excellence, integrity and equity, diversity, and inclusion.

In practice, this means that we turn down work and make inconvenient decisions about suppliers when we assess that they are in conflict with our purpose or values. In March this year, we made a bold decision to leave our big tech provider of productivity, groupware, email, and basically the core of most of work because they no longer align with our values. They have knowingly and unapologetically enabled violence, oppressive regimes and genocide, even doubling down and pursuing contracts with genocidal regimes, and removing policy directives to not use their AI for war. They have also turned their backs on our core values of equity, diversity and inclusion together with many of their contemporaries in big tech. These developments tipped the scales when combined with the already pervasive concern over data sovereignty. We won’t stand for it. Enough. We have expressed our concerns with them about this in the past and they can’t even take the time to address us. The product is technologically wonderful, but ethically intolerable for us. We have wanted to do this for well over a year, but the alternatives were difficult to see as these companies have made us so dependent on their products.

Our solution was found in Nextcloud, an open source productivity platform that has as many technological benefits as feature losses compared to our big-tech provider. It is made by a company, but offers a free community-supported version published under the AGPLv3 license, which ensures it remains free and open-source. We host and own the platform and data ourselves. While the former big-tech provider offered no support, there was a plethora of documentation and almost no issues over seven years. In Nextcloud, we depend on community support as well as some clever consultants. Clients and collaborators will generally not be familiar with the platform.

The transition was not instantaneously smooth. It is inconvenient, but that inconvenience is offset by the knowledge that we are not trusting big tech with our data, something about which we have always been hesitant. Plus, it felt like every time we clicked a button with the old provider we might as well have been pointing some drone at innocent civilians. The move has met our needs for data sovereignty, and enhanced security of data, and therefore our promise to clients and research and evaluation participants that their data will be safe with us. We are also able to move to a super privacy-focussed small business e-mail provider.

Our decisions were guided by the following considerations:

1. Data Guardianship and Ethical Considerations: Big-tech data practices, while offering some privacy controls, inherently revolve around extensive data collection and analysis. This raises legitimate concerns about potential misuse or unauthorised access, leaving users with a lingering sense of unease about the extent of corporate surveillance. In contrast, Nextcloud champions data ownership, enabling us to host our data on our own terms. This ensures our data remains within our chosen jurisdiction, subject to its specific laws and regulations. Moreover, Nextcloud's emphasis on encryption, both in transit and at rest, provides robust security, giving us the power to determine who accesses our data and how it is used. Last, our big-tech provider’ commitment to support an oppressive state with the full knowledge their technology is being used to commit genocide, and the recent backdown from DEI principles are misaligned with our values.
2. Embracing Openness and Transparency: Nextcloud's open-source nature fosters a culture of transparency and accountability. Its publicly available code allows for scrutiny, empowering users to verify its security and functionality. This stands in stark contrast to the closed-source nature of our previous big-tech provider, where users have limited visibility into its inner workings. Furthermore, the open-source model encourages community-driven development, leading to rapid bug fixes and feature enhancements, often surpassing the pace of proprietary software, while verifying the ways in which our data are used.
3. Liberation from Corporate Dependence: The big-tech provider inadvertently led to vendor lock-in, making migration to alternative platforms challenging. This dependence can stifle flexibility and innovation. Nextcloud, on the other hand, empowers users to break free from this reliance by offering self-hosting options. We gain the freedom to choose the hardware, software, and hosting provider that best aligns with our changing needs, fostering greater customisation and control. We of course continue to procure services from companies and we are not anti-company (we are ourselves a company), however, we seek alignment with our values, which are compromised by excessive profit-seeking and capital accumulation that takes precedence over care for people and planet. Definitely, making money from genocide is not something of which we want to be a part.
4. Holding suppliers to account: We don’t ask all suppliers to be like us. We have some bottom-line values that are fairly standard in our work: anti-corruption, anti-slavery, fair working conditions and so on. It doesn’t seem unreasonable at all to say we are anti-genocide and that we won’t do business with companies that enable it. To us, it would be bizarre not to.
5. Familiarity and User-Friendliness: Concerns about a steep learning curve are not as extreme as we had feared. Nextcloud boasts a user-friendly interface reminiscent of familiar software, ensuring a smooth transition. Core functionalities like file storage, document collaboration, calendar, contacts, and email are different, but not too different. Collaboration features are also well-catered for, with Nextcloud supporting real-time collaborative editing.
6. The Power of Open Source: Nextcloud's open-source foundation brings a wealth of benefits. A vibrant and active community provides unwavering support and contributes to its ongoing development. The platform's extensibility through apps and plugins allows for extensive customisation, tailoring the software to specific needs. Additionally, while there were initial setup costs, we expect Nextcloud will prove more cost-effective in the long run

Moving all our document storage, data processing software, and communications off of the platform that we have used since founding Dala was not easy, especially for a small company without dedicated IT support. It was incredibly brave of the staff to fully consent to the move, and we have spent countless hours planning, testing, and most recently migrating to providers with which we are more comfortable. We knew that this would complicate our work in the short-term with loss of some features we loved, learning new software, and dealing with glitches and compatibility issues. After two batches of testing (one 10 months ago, and then again more recently) we made the collective decision and then finished the migration. It is no surprise that a community-driven platform is not as polished as a company with annual revenue in the hundreds of billions, but it is impressive nonetheless what countless nerds around the world can do to contribute to a great product… thanks to open source developers everywhere! Most importantly, this software is in front of our faces all day long. We send links to it to our clients and participants in our work. Knowing that it is aligned with who we are means that we have reached a deeper level of integration of our values than we could before.

While this not our first technology shift to align with our values, it will also not be our last. It may be our biggest. Open source needs users to become better and there is a lot of it out there with which we are also experimenting. We write this knowing that we are not finished. The platform on which this post is made is owned by big-tech, and we still have some big tech in the back end of some of our processes, but we count this a large step forward and will continue to be diligent to chose to whom we give our hard-earned money for services that we use to support our purpose. Baby steps, generally, but this felt like a big one. Open source platforms rely on our collective support to grow and thrive to match the quality and reach of big tech—unlike big tech, they don’t have billion-dollar safety nets. If we don’t make the choice to back them now, who will?

For anyone inconvenienced by our decisions, we are sorry, but we have to be the best us we can. We thank you for your understanding and hope you can adjust to the changes as we have. Thanks again to all the staff for you patience, to clients who appreciate why we do this, and to open source developers who create real alternatives.

Article by Rodd Myers

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