I’m trying to write a document for my wife describing all the IT stuff I run so that she knows what to do or who to contact in case I can’t do it any more. My problem is that I don’t have any friends interested in these things. Nobody knows Perl around here. The two people that do live in Estonia and Canada and they don’t share my hobbies.
What is going to happen to a site like campaignwiki.org? Sure, my wife can keep them up for a while. But she’s not going to turn into a system admin? All these wikis and apps. Somebody should be running this stuff. How does one find people willing to take over? Damn. I should organise better.
The list of wikis on campaignwiki.org
The list of apps on campaignwiki.org
How does one archive these things for the future? The problem is that people can export their data but most of them will not, I’m sure. Upload to the Web Archive? Upload to Git Hub? Both? Other stuff? Are there other archives interested in this kind of thing? I mean, in a way I feel it is part of our collective history and how is that going to work, aren’t the national archives interested in keeping copies of all these things? They usually want copies of all the printed books… but websites? Apps? I think this necessarily must change – unless the apocalypse catches up, first.
Makes me think about resilience to capitalism and the apocalypse, both. I recently read the following by @yaaps, in an unrelated thread:
You’re an artisan. Occupying niches too small for economies of scale is how this precapitalist pattern survives and how it spawns new businesses under capitalism. It relies on a certain amount of privilege in that you need free time, skills, and personal/professional connections to succeed. in addition, the artisan is vulnerable to their own success. Replacing artisans with commodity labor is how capitalism grows
To scale up while maintaining autonomy, you need to establish a worker’s collective. That provides a model to distribute income for skilled labor, as needed, without selling equity.
Yeah. I reminded me of the fact that in order to get anything done, we need to organize. I should create an association according to Swiss law to run my sites and find people interested in keeping this stuff up. And then these people can continue after I’m gone? Let me know if you’re interested and we can write some bylaws together! It’s not hard, there are templates.
Swiss association, on Wikipedia
#Life #Administration
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An interesting idea: some sort of Sysop Buddy System.
– Alex Schroeder
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That’s a tricky one. So far, things I’ve done include making sure my sites are easy to crawl and/or re-host (mainly by making them static for the most part), and making sure trusted friends have admin rights on social media groups I manage. Not sure what to do about my domain names, since I don’t have anyone who’s both trusted enough and technical enough. Your solution is interesting.
– Felix 2020-07-29 15:32 UTC
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Reply by Cos.
I’ve also been part of an association offering hosting … many of our members have much less interest in helping to keep it going than they once did. A few faithful plug away, but each year things feel a little more grim.
Yes, that’s what I fear. In the past, I used Eggplant Farms. Super nice one-person operation. They used to be more than one but then it all shrank down to just one, sadly. We’d have to prepare for that, too.
I think bank accounts and passwords are ok. Gotta check those instructions again, though. And perhaps find a better way to access my passwords other than using Emacs...
– Alex Schroeder 2020-07-30 05:56 UTC
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I can gladly take over your websites and manage them in the way how you wish it. You would need only to pay your domains and hosting for the number of years you wish and need. Since 20 years I am managing servers. bugs@gnu.support
– Anonymous 2020-10-18 16:49 UTC
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Document your art. Archive your art. and Document Your Art: How to Archive, by @ajroach42.
Document your art. Archive your art.
Document Your Art: How to Archive
– Alex 2021-02-19 18:13 UTC