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

Sun Nov 14 03:26:23 UTC 2010

On 11/13/10, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki at gmail.com> 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

Ourproject.org does something like this, but I think that something
evolved with the help of the big free culture organizations and
building on this model, could turn into even a much greater resource.

http://ourproject.org/

Thanks,
Pharos

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