econ4peace Techculture | A GDPR Journey
We continue on a GDPR quest to ensure a restorative econ4peace techculture.
GDPR stands for General Date Protection Regulation and is thus far the most stringent requirement to protect personal information online. Merchant services are provided through GDPR compliant merchant services, Stripe. Philantro was developed in U.S. for nonprofits and is now based in Great Britain. Despite Brexit, Great Britain and the Commonwealth continue to require GDPR in online communications. GDPR is more stringent than CCPA, California’s recently implemented California Consumer Privacy Act.
Read on about our GDPR quest and the IT econ4peace development timeline.
The socialfieldwork.net site was built in 2017 to test wordpress.org and Open Source SAAS as a replacement for cumbersome Drupal and its Enterprise Resource Planning modules.
Back in 2009, we led in development of IT based collaboration for a start up nonprofit. Since then, emergent technologies have both eased, but also hampered the efforts of community organizations and environmental nonprofits; we needed to navigate this minefield.
WordPress.org benefits from development by a distributed network of independent contributors. These developers teach and practice solutions and provide open source guidance to counterbalance big tech.
In February 2020, the organization resumed operations and we launched the beta site for The Guild for Social Fieldwork. We have minimally added/refined content since.
Concurrently, we also moved our site to new servers due to the risks of working under the newly formed EIG conglomerate. In the course of a few years (2014 to 2017), EIG acquired and merged most web hosting providers in the U.S. Our previous host was merged and many of its tech support are now working for our current hosting company.
First we went to Canada and then we went with the eco-friendly web server providers to which numerous excellent US based tech support staff fled. In full transparency, our current webhosting isn’t perfect. We welcome support to strengthen our IT platform in even new directions.
Also since 2017, we continue to test open source GDPR level resources rather than rely on simple clickety-click GUI solutions. We protect our contributors contact info, privacy, interests, intellectual property and individual autonomy on what matters most. We do not use web beacons or cookies that contribute to mining data in any way.
The previous paragraph recounts the story of an unexpected technological “superpower” that had to be mastered in order to continue in our trajectory. The founder conducted IT sourcing and development primarily solo while working part time as a bookkeeper. Her choice to always engage in workaday employment over the last ten years has paid off in learning so much more about people and the challenges of local communities. She served cider, farmed, ran a community garden and even provided bookkeeping for a noted yacht rigger. Participating in small town trades gave a clear view on how techculture has infiltrated day to day operations. This journey will hopefully help supporters strengthen the trust that one can place in her efforts to create an ethics-driven organization.
We continue to refine our technology solutions for collaboration in ways that protect people. We have replaced the transitional econ4peace site (drupal to wordpress). Eventually, we may migrate content for the Guild to this newest framework of themes and builders for wordpress. It’s a solid, tight framework.
Each volunteer who becomes an epiASSOCIATE receives training in our GDPR compliant technology. You can also secure your information from data mining. We are offering online mini classes in GDPR personal computing. Join in!
We welcome web development volunteers and are willing to train individuals with at least six hours per week of time to dedicate. In addition, we hope to staff this position through small donors who contribute monthly.
It is now spring 2022. Our solution and approach are well-founded. Our team’s conceptual and experiential policy expertise rests on decades of effort. We have the tools and the on-the-ground, know-how to bring vision to reality. Thank you for considering a contribution today!