On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 12:39 PM, Greg Grossmeier greg@wikimedia.org wrote:
The idea that Brion expressed, I believe, is what we were going for with the public RFP for the MW Release Management work. It showed community support and something to point at (by anyone) if a weird decision was made (or interpreted as such).
Yes -- by no means am I recommending that I or WMF simply crown a preferred vendor by fiat! We would definitely want to go through a similar process; in fact that RFP was one of the things that inspired me to start thinking about hosting & support needs over the summer.
So, maybe the default install doc shouldn't say "Step 1: Create account at $Prefered_Vendor" but we can definitely have "known good vendors" listed somewhere...
Yes; we certainly shouldn't discourage self-hosting or other hosting.
What I mainly want us to accomplish is to make sure that end-users have a safe, up-to-date, "fast path" to setting up their own wiki, with the support they'll need to grow it or move it to self-hosting when they need it. This is more about the "how" (what we can accomplish for our users) than about "who" provides the services.
That could just as easily be a group of recommended hosting services and a confederation of independent consultants rather than a standalone company.
-- brion