use case: sharing media content between orgs

[Jean-Paul Calderone]

On Fri, Nov 27, 2020 at 3:45 AM Gulyás Attila <toraritte at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Would it be a valid use case for Tahoe-LAFS to share media content
> among organizations?
>
> To elaborate, there are many reading services for the blind all across
> the States (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_reading_service) and
> volunteer effort is duplicated for certain topics (e.g., grocery store
> flyers for large chains are the same for every state, yet services
> have their volunteers read these every week, independently of each
> other). These services all use different storage solutions (i.e.,
> on-site servers and different cloud vendors) and based on what I read
> so far Tahoe-LAFS could help to bridge this gap: organizations that
> choose to join would be able to contribute storage space to the grid
> and everyone would have uniform access to the content.
>
> Am I missing something? Thanks in advance!
>

Hi Gulyás,

At a very high level, this sounds plausible.  It is true that different
organizations can collaborate to form a Tahoe-LAFS storage "grid".  We talk
about the "grid" a lot but you really have to apply a lot of abstractions
to create this *concept* with Tahoe-LAFS right now (though there's some
work underway to turn it into a more concrete thing).

A Tahoe-LAFS "grid" is just one or more storage servers being used together
and you have a lot of flexibility around where those storage servers come
from.

It's true that each volunteer/service organization could operate one or
more storage servers and that a Tahoe-LAFS storage client could be
configured to use any and all of these servers for storage.  One area that
you probably want to think about more is how those organizations coordinate
with each other in their use of these servers and the creation and
consumption of content on them.

For example, would it make more sense to have a fully open grid or a
private grid open only to participating organizations?  A fully open grid
can accept contributions of resources from more participants but it also
gives out storage access to more participants as well.  A private grid
might make more sense but comes with operational security requirements to
ensure it remains private.

At the content level, how would different organizations offer content to
save other organizations labor?  Perhaps each organization maintains a
directory (or directory hierarchy) which only it can write to but which all
other organizations can read from.  This might be done on an ad hoc basis
or with a tool like magic-folder
<https://github.com/leastauthority/magic-folder> (which is currently very
much a work in progress).  Then organizations would browse the read-only
directories shared with them by other organizations to see if the desired
content already exists.  If found, they can retrieve and use it.  If not,
they can create and upload it.

This seems workable - however, I wonder if there is an advantage to using
Tahoe-LAFS over another system.  For example, Google Drive and Dropbox
would offer comparable experiences, I think, without the need to operate
storage servers.  Or, to avoid proprietary, centralized systems, NextCloud
has file storage and sharing capabilities.  It is not a distributed system
but it's easy to find a commercial offering that could be shared across
organizations.  This comes at a cost - but so does operating Tahoe-LAFS
storage servers, and I suspect NextCloud hosting is price competitive
(unless volunteer labor can be discounted, perhaps).

Or maybe it is the case that the loose group of organizations actually
benefit significantly from the distributed nature of Tahoe-LAFS - perhaps
because the operation of the software more closely matches the
relationships of the organizations to each other?

Does this make sense?  Does it help?  I'm happy to consider any follow-up
questions.

Jean-Paul



>
> Appreciatively,
> Attila Gulyas  |  IT/Program Assistant
> Email: agulyas at societyfortheblind.org
> Phone: (916) 889-7510
>
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> accessnews at societyfortheblind.org
>
> Access News system:
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>
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> Sacramento, CA 95811
>
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> www.societyfortheblind.org
>
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