Data For Good moves from Slack to self-hosted Mattermost for data sovereignty, open core flexibility

Data For Good is a French volunteer-driven nonprofit organization that brings open source technologists, product designers, and data scientists together to tackle social and environmental challenges, working in conjunction with non-government organizations (NGOs), public institutions, and private companies. 

Founded in 2014, the community of more than 6,000 technologists has supported over 100 projects since its inception, including Carbon Bombs, a data visualization project that tracks the world’s biggest fossil fuel extraction projects; Clearcutting Surveillance Brigade, a platform for detecting and reporting clear-cutting of forests; and Pyronear, a tool that helps detect wildfires.  

Moving to self-hosted tools for data sovereignty 

As an organization made up of thousands of volunteers, the Data For Good team is highly distributed. To stay connected and aligned, the organization needs a centralized communication platform where everyone can come together to share announcements, collaborate on projects, and otherwise stay connected. 

“Our whole organization relies on real-time chat tools for communication and project management,” says Ronan Sy, part of the management team and project lead at Data For Good. “Because we’re a loose community, our chat tool is also quite literally the town square of Data For Good.” 

The Data For Good team is a champion of using self-hosted technologies whenever they can to reclaim ownership of their data — and also to prove to other similar-sized organizations that smaller teams can run their own stacks, too, Sy explains. 

“We try to lead by example when it comes to digital sovereignty,” Sy says. “We try to run and maintain the software we need to operate ourselves, on our own infrastructure, in Europe. This way, we show a way forward for small companies to reclaim ownership of their data.” 

Not only does the nonprofit self-host its own tools, Data For Good regularly encourages the organizations they partner with to do the same. 

“We are helping NGOs gain new technical skills to maintain and use technical tools themselves,” says Ronay Sy, part of the management team and project lead at Data For Good. “As part of this mission, we are trying to push NGOs to use open source tools and open data projects.” 

Data For Good had been using Slack to collaborate but needed to move to a different solution that aligned with its organizational principles, Sy explains.  

“A tool as important as our community chat has to meet our governance standards, with as little dependencies on big tech companies as possible, and as much control over our data as possible,” he says. “Not being in control of the infrastructure or being subjected to forced software changes was essentially a non-starter for us.”  

Choosing self-hosted Mattermost as a Slack replacement 

As the Data For Good team began looking for a new collaboration solution, they started benchmarking several options against Slack — including Mattermost, Zulip, and Rocket.Chat —to see which one held up the best. 

“We chose Mattermost because it was open source, self-hostable, and had the best feature parity with Slack,” Sy continues, adding that Data For Good integrated GitHub, Nocodb, and Outline with its Slack instance. “We selected Mattermost as a candidate for replacing Slack because it’s possible to integrate all those tools into Mattermost.” 

Using Docker, Sy and his team deployed Mattermost on a cluster of bare metal machines. 

“The implementation has been very smooth so far,” Sy continues. “We’re now working on adding read replicas as well as search services to our Mattermost instance.”  

Using Mattermost as the ‘backbone’ of the operation 

Data For Good had been using Slack for communication, project management, team-building, and organizing events. The organization also relied on it to manage its large community and keep members engaged and informed.  

“Real-time chat is the backbone of our operation,” Sy says. “We’re confident that Mattermost will replace Slack for all of those use cases.”  

Whenever Data For Good selects a new project, the team spins up a dedicated Mattermost channel. “Volunteers coordinate their actions, share information, and collaborate in that channel,” he continues. “They also setup automations and integrations, such as a GitHub repository feed, in those channels. The channels also help the Data For Good team keep tabs on every project and track how they’re advancing.” 

Looking ahead, the organization is planning to build a suite of self-hosted open source tools to power its entire operation, using Mattermost Enterprise Edition as the glue that ties it all together. 

“We’re aiming to build an authentication platform dedicated to Data For Good, and Mattermost is the only chat tool we found that matches our use cases and supports OpenID connect,” Sy explains. “We’re really looking forward to creating a self-hosted open source tools suite that would have one single authentication method, and Mattermost would be the centerpiece of that suite.”  

In addition to fulfilling its mission, Data For Good aims to form long-lasting relationships with open source software technologists and hopes that its suite of tools will “set an example of efficiency without any dependency on big tech.” 

Due to their experiences with Mattermost, Ry and his team don’t hesitate to recommend it to other organizations needing a secure collaboration solution. 

“We actively promote Mattermost and even have organizations use Mattermost on our own instance by giving them a separate team where they can create their own channels,” Ry concludes.