Roll our own?

[recently_folded]

Again, this topic was raised in greywash's master thread and its comments, with some preliminary thoughts. Clearly, creating a whole new site would be a major undertaking, but so was AO3 and they're kind of the role model now. Can we do this? What do we need to do this? Who's interested in kicking this idea around?

Comments

the Network of Our Own

[mecurtin]

I am interested. I've looked at the financials for OTW (budget c. $500k and the Wikimedia Foundation (c $50M), and I think a Network of Our Own would need a budget of order of magnitude $5M/year (range $2M-$10M). More than 1/2 of this would be for staff: full-time pro coders, to start.

We should expect to have to pay for one year=$5M without seeing any site yet. This sounds like a Kickstarter to me. Probably someone who knows how to run this sort of project could outline the Kickstarter, levels, etc.

NO3 should probably follow the blueprint laid down by the OTW. Legal structure FIRST: what kind of non-profit? OTW & Wikimedia are 501(c)3, but I don't know if that's possible when people (e.g. artists) may using it as a storefront or advertising. There are a bunch of non-profit options that our legal eagles should discuss.

We'd need a Board of Directors early on, for legal purposes.

I don't know if it will be possible for NO3 to be eligible for grant money of various kinds. I would encourage anyone who's starting to think about the coding to apply for this fellowship (and similar): we can assume that most of the people working on NO3 will not be cis men.

[alchemia]

AO3/OTW/Fanlore maybe the role models, but that doesn't make them positive role models. I wouldn't want anything to do with them, or anything that partnered with them.

[recently_folded]

Can you expand on what specific things about their structure (or anything else) you don't want to see involved in a new fandom home? Negatives or unappealing aspects are important things to consider, but they need to be captured as specifics rather than just broad-based opinion if we are to use them effectively in planning.

[alchemia]

I no longer go in-depth in public posts or journals that are not mine (even if locked, the owner may change it). Here are a link to 3 public posts on my journal. Besides answering your questions above, they should make clear why I do not get into discussions in journalling space as I used to. If you have further questions, feel free to message me, or to request access to my journal to discuss there.

* I do not use AO3 Because.... https://alchemia.dreamwidth.org/311136.html (should be self explanatory I think)

* Violations Warnings for Fen who Have taken down / disassociated their ID from past Workworks https://alchemia.dreamwidth.org/304207.html (this has an ETA message "Fanlore, if you are reading this...." with a list of DO do XYZ, DON'T do ABC etc.)

* How OTW/FanLore may be changing fandom, especially meta discussions - For the Worse.... https://alchemia.dreamwidth.org/308124.html (I guess this was Tumblr as well? I never interacted on Tumblr but I get that impression from others in past few days- it would not be a safe place to discuss many topics we discussed freely in the early days of LJ. BUt Tumblr was never part of fandom so has an excuse that it wasn't aware or it didnt matter to it- where as anything claiming to be "by and for fen" should know better. )

[satsuma]

I think, at this point we’ve figured out that fandom HAS to own its own servers, so we’re either modifying an existing open source site (such as dreamwidth, mastodon, diaspora, ao3’s code etc) or we’re building our own from scratch. And the level of modification we’ll need to make it work how we want it to means we’ll probably end up having to write 90% of the code either way.

So the tradeoff, i guess, is between adapting something and therefore having things running sooner, but then having to pay back all the technical debt from having to hack everything onto a system that wasn’t built for us, or doing everything from scratch and having it go a lot slower to start (and therefore risk losing momentum/visibility etc, as people are looking for somewhere they can move NOW) but possibly run smoother long term

[powerful_dusk_88623]

I've had a chance now to go through all (I think) the posts and comments here, and I'd like to ask the mods if you'd like me to do anything or answer anything here beyond what I laid out in my first comment. I can answer some of the technical questions to the limit of my own experience and summarize what I've investigated so far wrt non-profit/other models and payment processors, but I don't want to spam the comm.

[recently_folded]

I think that this whole discussion is in the information-gathering stage, feeling our way to what options exist, which concerns can be answered, rather than the specific solution stage. Nonetheless, collecting and looking at possibilities is part of what we want to do right now, so thank you for adding this to the discussion.

Feel free to add more information or, if you prefer not to overwhelm with detail, posting some of that to your own site and then linking to it from here is also fine.

Dear mods:

[mecurtin]

I just made a big post on the possibility of a Network of Our Own. As you can see, I'm encouraging people to come here for discussion, to make it as general as possible.

Should I/could I repost my post on this community?

Re: Dear mods:

[recently_folded]

I think that linking to your post over there is fine, especially since you've suggested that conversation on your points can be taken up over here so it's centrally-collected. If nothing else, that helps combat the Great Wall o' Text fatigue.

I do think, though, that you might well re-post the fellowship information separately, since that seems like something that deserves wider publicity of its own.

[mecurtin]

OK! I made the post about the fellowships. It probably needs more tags, but I didn't want to just go adding them on my own.