On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 08:17:06PM -0800, phoebe ayers wrote:
On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 11:05 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 12 November 2010 17:34, Anthony wikimail@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: Maybe I'll do it. I've been working out costs for running virtual servers and cloud services in spreadsheets (and I have one virtual host running live).
Now that I've got a small, self sustaining pilot running, I'm not entirely sure what to *do* with the remaining capacity. It's turning out to be a solution looking for a problem.
Now your suggestion looks like a problem looking for a solution. ;-)
In fact I've already started doing some hosting for oss/wiki type folks on my (ostensibly commercial) system as things stand now. With a little help from a cloud-type-person from fedora project (BCCed), I should be able to scale up as needed.
Scaling up *would* require some sort of financial committments from people using the system. But that would be (considerably!) less than Eur100/month (depending on requirements). People who can afford to pay a little would effectively support those who can't afford to pay.
sincerely, Kim Bruning