I have no particular opinion on the proposal below, nor does it have anything directly to do with us, but I was just thinking that for disasters that are easy to foresee, we might want to think about how we can be prepared in advance to bring people the information they need.
Is there anything we can do in advance to prepare?
We're so fast anyway, I have no ideas, but I thought I'd pass along the notion.
-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Being Prepared in the face of Hurricane Wilma as far as communications. Date: Thu, 20 Oct 2005 23:08:54 -0600 From: Taran Rampersad cnd@knowprose.com Reply-To: cnd@knowprose.com Organization: KnowProSE.com To: mobileactive@mobileactive.org, Jamais Cascio cascio@worldchanging.com, The Digital Divide Network discussion group digitaldivide@milhouse.edc.org
While Wilma is headed somewhere to in the Gulf region, and has already caused deaths in Haiti, it might be a good idea to get the community involved before disaster strikes, and set up alternative means of communication at the community level - and let people know *before* disaster strikes.
Projects such as the ARC (http://www.knowprose.com/ARC ; http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4149977.stm ) can be set up NOW, and be ready before disaster strikes an area. Organized communication BEFORE a disaster, DURING a disaster, and AFTER a disaster. SMS and HAM radio always seem to be the main means of dependable communication.
I wrote an entry (link below) to share. Please share widely, by email, weblog, print, television, radio, carrier pigeon and telling your gossipy acquaintances at the coffee shop and bar:
http://www.knowprose.com/node/9106
Or, we can just wait and blame someone else for not doing anything.
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Jimmy Wales wrote:
I have no particular opinion on the proposal below, nor does it have anything directly to do with us, but I was just thinking that for disasters that are easy to foresee, we might want to think about how we can be prepared in advance to bring people the information they need.
Is there anything we can do in advance to prepare?
We're so fast anyway, I have no ideas, but I thought I'd pass along the notion.
<snipped>
Distributed computing is the way to go here. I don't think we'd be able to maintain full functionality in the event of a major hit on the Florida servers, but I have some ideas about how we might be able to at least stay up (sorry if some of these sound stupid or obvious):
* The Paris/Amsterdam/Korea servers (not entirely sure how these are being used at present) could be put into a "serve cached versions only" mode as soon as contact with Florida was lost. Anything in the squid caches (any devs know the percentage of total content?) would still be viewable. * Once we have the infrastructure, have entire database backups (or at least parts of them) scattered around the place so that should Florida go down for an extended period (or be destroyed completely), everything would still be safe. I forget what the estimated worth of all the Wikimedia content is, but I believe it's in the millions of dollars. * Invest in wireless communications technology and reliable power backup systems. If major local infrastructure was destroyed (power, data lines) but the servers themselves were still intact, they would still be useful if they could be connected with the rest of the internet (even if only as read-only). With a decent antenna, it should be possible to get 20km range on a wireless connection, so multiple points could pick up and statically serve the data.
Of course, these all depend on us having enough money to do this. When will Wikimedia get its own colocation facility? Or does it have one already?
- -- Alphax | /"\ Encrypted Email Preferred | \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613 | X Against HTML email & vCards http://tinyurl.com/cc9up | / \
Alphax wrote:
- Once we have the infrastructure, have entire database backups (or at
least parts of them) scattered around the place so that should Florida go down for an extended period (or be destroyed completely), everything would still be safe. I forget what the estimated worth of all the Wikimedia content is, but I believe it's in the millions of dollars.
Well, as of July 2005, all of the different language editions of Wikipedia came to 491 M words: it must be _considerably_ greater than that now. At a journalist's rate of $1/word, that would make Wikipedia worth in excess of $500,000,000.
-- Neil
On 10/20/05, Neil Harris usenet@tonal.clara.co.uk wrote:
Alphax wrote:
- Once we have the infrastructure, have entire database backups (or at
least parts of them) scattered around the place so that should Florida go down for an extended period (or be destroyed completely), everything would still be safe. I forget what the estimated worth of all the Wikimedia content is, but I believe it's in the millions of dollars.
Well, as of July 2005, all of the different language editions of Wikipedia came to 491 M words: it must be _considerably_ greater than that now. At a journalist's rate of $1/word, that would make Wikipedia worth in excess of $500,000,000.
-- Neil
They get about 50 billion hits a year, right? So at $2 CPM that's $100 million a year, and at a P/E of 20 that's $2 billion. Of course, that's more than just the value of the content, and it ignores the expenses to run the site, which isn't much compared to $100 million a year.
It's too bad non-profits can't IPO. :)
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Anthony DiPierro wrote:
On 10/20/05, Neil Harris usenet@tonal.clara.co.uk wrote:
Alphax wrote:
- Once we have the infrastructure, have entire database backups (or at
least parts of them) scattered around the place so that should Florida go down for an extended period (or be destroyed completely), everything would still be safe. I forget what the estimated worth of all the Wikimedia content is, but I believe it's in the millions of dollars.
Well, as of July 2005, all of the different language editions of Wikipedia came to 491 M words: it must be _considerably_ greater than that now. At a journalist's rate of $1/word, that would make Wikipedia worth in excess of $500,000,000.
-- Neil
They get about 50 billion hits a year, right? So at $2 CPM that's $100 million a year, and at a P/E of 20 that's $2 billion. Of course, that's more than just the value of the content, and it ignores the expenses to run the site, which isn't much compared to $100 million a year.
It's too bad non-profits can't IPO. :)
Which reminds me of a post to helpdesk-l the other day...
Hello, I am thoroughly impressed with the Wikipedia project.
May I ask, would it be possible to receive an administration account in return for a sizable donation?
The answer is clearly "no"; can't you get a server named after yourself though?
- -- Alphax | /"\ Encrypted Email Preferred | \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613 | X Against HTML email & vCards http://tinyurl.com/cc9up | / \
On 10/21/05, Alphax alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
The answer is clearly "no"; can't you get a server named after yourself though?
Donate enough and you can get your own project (see wikijunior).
-- geni
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geni wrote:
On 10/21/05, Alphax alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
The answer is clearly "no"; can't you get a server named after yourself though?
Donate enough and you can get your own project (see wikijunior).
Hrm, I wonder when Golden Palace Casino will ask for WikiCasino to be set up...
- -- Alphax | /"\ Encrypted Email Preferred | \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613 | X Against HTML email & vCards http://tinyurl.com/cc9up | / \