[Foundation-l] Should we offer to host citizendium?

[phoebe ayers]

On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 11:05 AM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12 November 2010 17:34, Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org> wrote:
>
>> These are all questions which would have to be answered before WMF
>> should even consider getting involved.  To cover itself legally it
>> should have the agreement of Larry Sanger, the Tides Center, and at
>> least a majority of the Management Counsel
>> (http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Management_Council).
>
>
> This would be WMF just providing ISP services for free, no more liable
> than Slicehost presently are.

You know what would be kind of awesome? If there was a neutral hosting
service -- by which I mean neutral hosting and technical support
service -- for a whole variety of small free content projects that
don't truly have the capacity to run independent technical
organizations but are otherwise fairly stable. We've seen two such
organizations brought up on Foundation-l just this year -- the
fanhistory wiki and now Citizendium -- both of which need stable
hosting, people who understand MediaWiki, and maybe even a bit of an
organizational platform (like fundraising support) too. This platform
could be a hosting service that was geared towards free and
participatory projects, the upstart free content of the web.

Such a hosting service would be a commons approach to this problem,
with the costs and burden shared not just among the small projects but
perhaps among the big ones too: I can see the big free culture
organizations (us, Mozilla, Creative Commons, etc.) pitching in to
such a thing in order to have a space to direct small projects to.
This would be different from wiki hosting because perhaps all the
projects wouldn't even be a wiki, as we understand them now; and there
would be room for Citizendium's funky branch of MediaWiki and every
other hack you can think of.  And it would be neutral ground: not
necessarily tied to the values of our Foundation or anyone else's.

What do you think? Does such a thing exist already? Would it work?

-- Phoebe