For the 4th year in a row, DigitalOcean is supporting our efforts with free credits to host our infrastructure. As Open Source partisans that we are our entire online infrastructure is based in FLOSS software and we are happy to see that there is a hosting company out there that has our back. All this amount of credits that we have been disposed by DigitalOcean over the years is worth thousands of dollars, an amount we cannot afford monthly and this means that our infrastructure would have been cut and we would only have the bare minimum of services to keep us alive, and of course, using services provided by big tech is something we are definitely trying to avoid, and this support has got us covered, we can self-host our services, and continue our work in an independet way and without trading our privacy.

Open Labs’ digital infrastructure is consisted of:

• Website – powered by WordPress
• Cloud – powered by Nextcloud
• Forum – powered by Discourse
• Wiki – powered by MediaWiki
• Pad – powered by Etherpad
• Event ticketing – powered by Attendize
• Geoportal – internal public project (code stored on GitHub)

Our infrastructure in the times of COVID-19

The global pandemic of the new coronavirus COVID-19 brought us in a very difficult position with our monthly expenses. As we have cancelled every event we were planning, every chance of receiving funding is gone now and practically our only sources of income have been our donors on Patreon and the Shuttleworth Foundation grant we received in January. Support from DigitalOcean is exactly what we need at this point.

Now that all our events and meetings have gone remotely, we have noticed that traffic on our community forum is way bigger than the previous weeks prior to the COVID-19 lockdown in Albania. We are very happy to be able to have a place for people to share their thoughts and concerns regarding the change in the digital ecosystem.

From us at Open Labs to DigitalOcean: Faleminderit 😊 (aka Thank you)!