[Freedombox-discuss] Live Demonstration Infrastructure

Thu Feb 25 15:56:37 UTC 2016

Adrian that sounds like an interesting possibility but perhaps a little
more heavy-weight than the sort of low-barrier to entry live tour that I
had been imagining. What Sunil suggests sounds to me like the kind of
experience that might have a high chance of capturing the further
interest of casual visitors.

The kind of firewalled web-only experience that Sunil proposes would
actually solve a number of the challenges that I was thinking might be
major obstacles to setting up some public demo. As far as I'm concerned
a few pre-configured user accounts and some prepopulated data in
owncloud would be great. I don't think it is any problem at all to
provide visitors with access to the various administrative configuration
pages for non-web-based services that they can't actually access.
Putting myself in the shoes of a potential user I think seeing how easy
something like openvpn is to set up in plinth would be more than enough
to peak my interest.

Sunil, is there any reason that you feel 15 minutes is the idea reset
rate? If I'm understanding the setup you envision correctly a demo
instance would refresh without warning every 15 minutes? I would think
that many users in the target audience for this demo would attribute a
reset of the demo instance they were using to instability in Freedombox.
Furthermore, I feel like the quality of Freedombox is to the point that
it is probably reasonable to expect that the median use time will be 15
minutes or even greater which suggests that a large number of potential
users would experience one of these resets while using the demo. Would
something like an hour be too long do you think?

- J.D.

J.D. Bean, Esq.
Counsel
Software Freedom Law Center
Tel: 212-461-1918  |  1995 Broadway, 17th Floor
Fax: 212-580-0898  |  New York, NY 10023
GPG: 353762FB      |  www.softwarefreedom.org

On 02/24/2016 12:15 AM, Adrian Gropper wrote:
> The infrastructure I'm using to develop HIE of One is another option.
> Some visitors might prefer to pay $5 for a one month trial. We could
> even provide a tool so they could migrate their data from the VM
> FreedomBox to their self-hosted one.
> 
> A slightly more elaborate scheme would pass a single $5/mo account among
> visitors as a kind of "pay it forward". When someone was done demoing
> their VM and moved their certificates to a self-hosted box, they would
> pass control to the next visitor on the list. That way, the average
> trial might be $ 1 or 2 and folks would feel good about moving from
> hosted to self-hosted.
> 
> Here's the documentation I have so far for Digital Ocean:
> https://github.com/HIEofOne/PersonalAS/wiki/Milestone-0:--Install-FreedomBox-as-a-%245-mo-Digital-Ocean-droplet
> 
> Adrian
> 
> On Tue, Feb 23, 2016 at 11:37 PM, Sunil Mohan Adapa <sunil at medhas.org
> <mailto:sunil at medhas.org>> wrote:
> 
>     On 02/23/2016 11:21 PM, J.D. Bean wrote:
>     > Hi all,
>     >
>     > I've been playing with Freedombox and lurking here for a while now and
>     > wanted to raise the issue of setting up some sort of live demonstration
>     > instance of Freedombox for potential users/contributors to play with
>     > before. When considering browser-based tools I find that these sorts of
>     > demonstrations have a strong impact on my interest-level in the project
>     > and was wondering if anyone had any thoughts about making this kind of
>     > demonstration a goal for the project?
>     >
>     > I'm not sure what sorts of tools are used by other web app projects to
>     > set up there demo instances and I have a hunch that setting something
>     > like this up might present some non-negligible technical challenges.
>     > Some examples of demo instances for web-based projects include:
> 
>     Web based demo is indeed a powerful way to spike interest among casual
>     visitors.  I gave a some thought to it a while back without much
>     conclusion.  Here's an idea that could work:
> 
>     On a reasonably powerful machine, we could spawn a dozen or so
>     VMs/containers from a snapshot.  We don't allow incoming connections on
>     these except on web port for interacting with Plinth (this will be a
>     web-only demo).  People can login, install applications, configure
>     system etc. but they will not be able to use services unless they are
>     web-base services such as ownCloud.  Then every 15 minutes or so, we
>     will reset all the VMs/containers state to the snapshot state.
> 
>     This may be possible with minimal setup and maintenance effort.
> 
>     --
>     Sunil
> 
> 
> 
>     _______________________________________________
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>     Freedombox-discuss at lists.alioth.debian.org
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> 
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> 
> Adrian Gropper MD
> 
> PROTECT YOUR FUTURE - RESTORE Health Privacy!
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