This is what we talked about in the OpenSpace session on “Protecting Against Dictators” – enabling stake holders to exercise their RightToFork.
I think this is what we need to offer, based on my own experience:
A danish university – teachers and instructors have a blog, there are wikis for courses. When the teachers move to a new job, can they take their data with them? It turns out that they keep their account, have access to the data, but there are no efforts underway (yet) to facilitate the export of data.
EmacsWiki – Alex has taken great pains to provide an archive of the files needed to run the site (and the site doesn’t need a database). He also has an archive of all the static HTML pages for emergencies. Setting up a copy of the site, however, requires manual intervention. So much, in fact, that nobody bothered to resurrect the site when only a short break was anticipated. Plus, the bandwidth used by the archives amounted to 20% of the site traffic, about 2G per month. This was solved by only allowing access to the archives to a small number of people. Another problem is that once the site is down, there is no simple way to find out who has backups and there is no plan for bringing the site back up.
Wikipedia – only lead administrators can make complete backups, because some of the information in the databases is only meant to be seen by administrators. The backup plans and the plans for getting the site back up elsewhere are not widely known, so we don’t know what they are.
A small wiki for about 100 users – no plans exist, adhoc backups are made, there is no license attached to the site, so the only implicit license is to modify and distribute them on the original site. There seems to be no right to fork (no free content).
See also: The same notes on the WikiSym wiki.
The same notes on the WikiSym wiki
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