[Foundation-l] Latest board resolutions

Sun Jul 30 07:16:08 UTC 2006

Oldak Quill wrote:

>On 29/07/06, Michael R. Irwin <michael_irwin at 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.  

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?

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.  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.

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.

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 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.

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.

I think the above offsite backup would be a reasonable thing to begin 
considering at this point even disregarding legal concerns.  

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.

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.

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. 

regards,
lazyquasar