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

[Kim Bruning]

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 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: 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


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