The grand plan
Posted: Tue May 13, 2008 2:59 am
It's currently hosted by GoDaddy. Who whoever they outsource to. Nobody does any work these days except India.Alan Kirk in the Applix forum: Slightly slower than this one, much faster than Cognos Communities, but it's great to see someone taking the bull by the horns.
However... there are a couple of practical issues that probably need to be covered.
The first is that I don't think a Forum run by any single individual is viable, simply because continuity will be so vital. One of the objectives of the exercise would be to ensure that we're never left hanging out in the wind again as we may be with Iboglix. Gods forbid that you get bored with it, or worse, Helen Clark drags you off to the Beehive to have her wicked way with you. I'm aware of the danger of camels being horses designed by a committee, but I also think that whatever evolves will need between half a dozen and a dozen administrators just to make sure that there's enough redundancy in case someone gets busy or gets bored, that all timezones are covered (as far as is possible) for support, and that there are enough hands to pass the torch on to should anyone move on from the OLAP area.
The second is the cost of running the thing. Again, there would be a danger if any one individual had to carry the can. I don't think that we'd need to go so far as a formal contract, but I think that there would need to be at least an "honour system" agreement between the founding fathers (and mothers, as the case may be) to share some of the cost. I can't speak for others, but I'd be more than happy to kick in a few Denari. Possibly a small amount of targeted advertising and a PayPal donation option would provide further funding to the tune of $US 1.50 in a good year.
Out of curiosity, where's this hosted at the moment?
Yes, when I get a chance I intend to add a "Donate" button. It's not especially expensive at about $US100 a year all up, so if a few people were happy to donate $US10 then that would mean no need for ads.
I also intend to pass out the FTP details for the domain and for this BB to a few individuals who volunteer.
Ultimately I would like to see this website evolve to include a wiki (starting small with an OLAP definition, a Dimension definition etc and growing from there), a jobs page (similar to TM1Jobs.com but not TM1 specific) and links to other blogs, if not blogs run on the site itself.
Anybody got some other ideas for the site?
Obviously I don't have the time to do it all myself and as Alan rightly points out it's in nobody's interest for any one person to do it all.
Cheers,
Martin