Michael R. Irwin wrote:
Oldak Quill wrote:
On 29/07/06, Michael R. Irwin
<michael_irwin(a)verizon.net> wrote:
The major asset of the
project/program/community/foundation is the
FDL'ed databases, GPL'ed software, and community of contributors,
developers, and other volunteers.
A new Foundation could be back up and operating at current levels within
a quarter or two with an aggressive public funding drive for hardware.
If a Wikimedia chapter in, say, Sweden were to run servers much like
the ones in France. Would it be feasible to get these running as
database servers quickly, in case your scenario were to happen?
So if Wikimedia and its assets were taken down in the US, those in
other countries could quickly replace them?
Bottleneck would probably be the professional expertise and effort the
WMF pays for routine reliable staff effort in organizational matters and
for administrator and development support.
Only if our existing experts are in jail.
Perhaps if the Swedish/X Chapter is organized properly;
a management
reserve or emergency operations plan could contracted for and funded in
advance such that sufficient Swedish currency is in Swedish/X financial
accounts (earning appropriate returns relative to required on demand
liquidity) to hire/contract the WMF's technical and administrative staff
to fly to Sweden for a few months and setup and maintain the new servers?
Why just Sweden? Brazil could be another alternative. More than one
alternative would be even better.
Once the WMF or new equivalent in U.S. was back up and
running they
could rehire the technical and administrative staff and reestablish
operations in Florida or equivalent.
Going back straightaway into the jaws of the problem is a little risky.
To be really efficient the
individual staff contracts could require that all useful tourist photos
be submitted to the commons at the earliest reasonable convenience
prior to receipt of final performance bonus.
That's just like some companies who believe that they have a say over
what their employees can do in their own homes.
Perhaps this could structured in advance as part of the
operations
plan. Setup the independent Swedish
chapter/corporation/foundation/nonprofit in advance with read only
mirror service kept up to date with a periodic database update via .....
what? DVD? Digitial tape? Backups were still under a gigabye back when
I messed with off-site backups.
Why not multiple distributed backups.
Obviously the above is a layman's view of how to
structure a reserve
operations capacity for transitional purposes. The legal beagles and
the Board would have to do the international contracts so it is legally
fullproof. The technical staff would have to figure an efficient
mirror or startup capacity and how to transfer data reliably and
routinely such that they could flyin and buy more hardware, bandwidth,
install the latest snapshot and have the Swedish site up and operational
in minimun time.
Maybe the WMF could ask for technical proposal and bids from any
associated international chapters with an appropriate non profit
organization in place and pick the best overall deal for the WMF's
donated funds to be expended upon.
The direct funding for that back-up facility should ideally come from
sources in that country.
The situation is fraught with possibilities. Probably
depends mostly on
what the Board and the WMF staff feel would be useful, reasonable
(responsible cost effective expenditure of donated funds) and airtight
from a legal standpoint.
There is no such thing as an air tight legal opinion.
I still have a hard time envisioning serious legal
difficulties
considering the statement of conditions each contributer agrees to prior
to submittal of material and the fact that we now have a paid operations
staff ready and willing to delete alleged offending material or
situations and investigate in detail later. It would seem like any
serious slander or copyright or other legal issues mostly belong to the
contributor as long as the WMF is careful to respond with due diligence
to complaints and/or particularly to subpoenas and court orders.
The circumstances that would trigger a move to servers in an other
country would be highly unusual. A simple copyright infringement
lawsuit is not likely to get that serious. Having paid staff working on
search and destroy missions would compromise the argument that they are
only running an ISP. I have no problem with due dilligence in the
circumstances you describe, but even that should be guided by
even-handedness rather than panic.Complaints clearly need to be
investigated, but immediate deletions based on allegations without
standing should have the investigation precede the deletion.
I think the above offsite backup would be a reasonable
thing to begin
considering at this point even disregarding legal concerns.
These are still Plan-B emergency considerations.
I mean the rest of the world does not want Wikimedia
projects to be
offline indefinitely just because some terrorist organization with a
collective I.Q. greater than 25 sneaks a few dirty (radioactive dust,
smallpox, EMP, power grid failures, rampaging domestic politicians,
whatever) bombs/incidents into key U.S. cities in the 95% of shipping
containers that are not currently inspected prior to entry into U.S. ports.
True enough, but one has to remember the large number of forces working
to thwart the terrorists by matching their I.Q. This only proves that
25+25<50. Emirate ports may be a little more effective than U.S. ones.
Heck, if I want to do some research after hearing
rumors from the Media
Moguls about some disaster in Florida (or other key internet hub
location like say New York; California {San Andreas fault}; the Midwest
{Yellowstone Supervolcano}; random super tsanamis or asteroid stikes;
it would suit me just fine if up to date mirrors capable of handling the
full emergency world wide load from me and other gawkers were online
while the WMF Board and staff followed emergency directions to the
nearest interstate evacuation route.
To think that we will soon have another asteroid to wipe out the
dinosaurs is pure wishful thinking.
OTOH, some people view a little redundancy in
information systems and
emergency preparedness system wide as a complete waste of resources.
Better to just keep a spare Wikipedia DVD, dehydrated dihydrogen oxide,
and last year's portable computer with proper power supply adapter in
the back of your vehicle and forget about kibitzing over jammed comm
systems in the unlikely event of an emergency.
Wasn't the internet invented in the first place to provide redundancy
for military communications?