We need to better communicate our plans and goals, and of course about downtime. But we also don’t want to flood average wiki users with sitenotices either. What kinds of communication would you like to see more of?
I will put out a sitenotice soon, but I need the outgoing board to buy-in first. Which I’m hoping will happen in the next few hours.
RE:communications I'd like to see more of.
1. The shutdown notice would have been one; important news, instead of only posting on Twitter and other social media. After a few tweets like "30,000 wikis!" (not all active, ahem), this just turns into noise.
2. Decisions made by the board. A summary will do.
3. Current or ongoing technical issues. Or do we have to go through the whole of outstanding Phabricator tasks?
This communication can be accomplished by subscription. I would then like to see a notification/bell made with a capsule of what's being shared and its location within the Miraheze maze.
On other business, check out Lithuania as a possible location. It's a very tech-oriented country, and I've worked on a MediaWiki-based wiki based there. I don't know the specific server farm or company.
Also: > Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email [email protected] and we'll look at the data.
Miraheze is mostly volunteer-run but it also needs a commercial side (such as selling premium features/support, and paying some people to handle them), so an obvious solution is a coop. I can help found a coop in Finland, where we have several long-standing MediaWiki devs, so that any EU person can easily participate. There might be other suitable EU jurisdictions but Finnish law is quite nice and easy: https://www.finlex.fi/en/laki/kaannokset/2001/en20011488.pdf
In any case I'm pretty sure we could get 501(c)3 public charity status, even though Miraheze missed out on charity status in the UK. If you could follow up on-wiki about co-op status as an option, I'd appreciate it.
On accountability: Members of the board need to come from the community and represent the community. Yes, it's true that no one tried to run for the board seats that were available, but people weren't encouraged to do so enough. I don't think the decisions were bad in and of themselves, but that not enough effort was made to get community support.
On paid premium features: I'm not opposed, but I want to see a business model that works without taking significant resources away from our free customers.
There are several months of runway, all the servers are still up, and many volunteers are still around. All we need is more leadership that is ready to focus on our core mission of offering free, ad-free, volunteer driven hosting to wikis with a lot of options. With a little networking, the finances are a solvable problem.
I'm in talks with the current board to see if a group of current and former volunteers can take over, either by working in the current organization, or starting a new nonprofit and working from there.
I still think Miraheze could have a bright future, and that this was a series of mistakes that got blown far out of proportion to the actual problems that the wiki farm faces.
AMA. I was not involved in the current crisis, so piecing together what happened has been something of a puzzle to me, but I can try to answer most questions.