The fate of ES is still in turmoil. A person unknown to the ES community bought the ES from longtime list maintainer Knightmb. Trevor intended to monetize the site, but members rebelled. Trevor realized he got in way over his head and everything points toward that the ES members and mods will take back control.
The question is exactly how will the "new" ES look like. Broadly the answer is pretty clear: Most poster want it to look very similar to the "old ES"
What is uncertain now is:
How will we take it back?
Buy it back? If so should those that front (potentially large) amount of money have a larger interest/influence in the "new ES" (essentially as in a shareholder company)
Or simply start a new site on a new domain using donated facilities and network?
Edit: Longtime ES member Justin from ebikes.ca bought ES from Trevor, so the above point is passe, but the "how will the future ES be run" points below still apply.
How will the future moderator selection happen, and how will governance work? Members are clearly generally happy with the admissive style of moderation on ES. I think the way the takeover happened showed a weakness though. There was too much secrecy. First the site was secretly sold. Then this news was pushed on the mod list to win over the mods. Many mods seem to have felt this was wrong, but didn't fight it particularly hard on the mods list. It was only when the news of the takeover was broken on the general forum that the fire and resistance begun.
Personally I think while it may make sense to have a separate mod list, with suitable posting restrictions, this list should be open for reading. There shouldn't be a way to hide dirty laundry from the members.
I work at a university, and see this problem all the time. The univ administration hides things from us teachers, and in turn we are not involving the students when we discuss curriculums and courses. I have proposed more openness, but those in power tend to oppose it. Secrecy is a way of keeping a tighter grip on that power.
I don't mean to imply that mods had bad intents with the closed mods list. Just pointing out the dangers of not having full transparency. If the membership had seen the takeover 2 weeks ago when it was presented on he mods list maybe it could have been stemmed much earlier.
Finally, it might be good to consider some examples how other on-line communities of "like minded" are run. (With like minded I mean sharing the very much non-mainstream nature of many members apparent in e.g. Big Moose's statement that the value of my oscilloscope exceeds that of my car. Or Methods wedding pictures with him on the ebike and the bride in the bike trailer!)
Here are three examples:
First, I'm a member of a completely non-commercial list for VW (camper) bus owners, (called Vanagon in the US, Transporter or Caravelle elsewhere in the world). Certainly an alternative group of people also.
Similar to ES the list was first run and administered by a single person. Eventually membership, size of archives and the time involved became too much. At that time an open discussion of what to do next was started on the list and it was agreed to continue without commercial involvement. Members donated and a server was bought. This server has been circulating between various places, and hooked up to use spare bandwidth of members/admins who can get that for free through their workplace or business. Thus all content is on hardware that clearly belong to the members. The whole thing was very inexpensive. Donations were typically $10-100, and total collected is only in the order of thousands.
The list was started in 1994. Since then many privately owned or commercial vw bus lists and web sites have been started (sometimes spawned by members of the original list). While these had much fancier visuals (and ads of course!), the text-only based original mailing list survived despite its primitive format. Many of the original members from 1994 are also still there. Total membership has been very stable at around 800 during the past decades.
So this model of communal list ownership seems very stable and durable.
As a second example, Peter Perkins pointed to how Insigtcentral (for owners of the Honda Insight) was commercialized some years ago.
The third example I wanted to bring up is Instructables. This site started with a creative membership which (much like us) like to make things, often from recycled materials. At first the site was free and everyone had equal access. Eventually the site was "monetized". Increasing number of ads appeared, and one had to pay for "premium membership" to access full instructions. This caused uproar. The situation is similar to what we would have faced on ES: Volunteers contribute content, while owners earn the reward from ad placement (estimated at around $2million/year for Instructables based on web statistics and usual ad rates).
The breaking news for Instructables is that it has now taken a third step into commercialization. It was bought by Autodesk last month. Autodesk makes programs that creative people use such as Photoshop, Autocad, Maya. I use the latter two for 3D modeling here at school. Now Autodesk is not interested in the ad income from instructables. 2 million is a drop in the bucket for them. They are interested in the amount of control over the members they can gain from owning instructables. This can be illustrated by an example. Before members used to creatively put together things from cheap electronic components or recycled parts. One memorable "instructable from years ago showed how to make a recumbent using only hand tools by recycling a mixte frame bike and a kids bike.
The new use of instructables will according to the web announcement support a completely different creativity (from their web site):
http://www.instructables.com/id/Autodesk-Acquires-Instructables-What-It-Means-for/step8/Homestyler/
So of the three examples which one do we want? For me it is clear that number one is the only safe and reasonable choice. Note that number two can always be turned into number three at the will of the owner(s), but number one can be constructed in a safe way.
Martin
The question is exactly how will the "new" ES look like. Broadly the answer is pretty clear: Most poster want it to look very similar to the "old ES"
What is uncertain now is:
How will we take it back?
Buy it back? If so should those that front (potentially large) amount of money have a larger interest/influence in the "new ES" (essentially as in a shareholder company)
Or simply start a new site on a new domain using donated facilities and network?
Edit: Longtime ES member Justin from ebikes.ca bought ES from Trevor, so the above point is passe, but the "how will the future ES be run" points below still apply.
How will the future moderator selection happen, and how will governance work? Members are clearly generally happy with the admissive style of moderation on ES. I think the way the takeover happened showed a weakness though. There was too much secrecy. First the site was secretly sold. Then this news was pushed on the mod list to win over the mods. Many mods seem to have felt this was wrong, but didn't fight it particularly hard on the mods list. It was only when the news of the takeover was broken on the general forum that the fire and resistance begun.
Personally I think while it may make sense to have a separate mod list, with suitable posting restrictions, this list should be open for reading. There shouldn't be a way to hide dirty laundry from the members.
I work at a university, and see this problem all the time. The univ administration hides things from us teachers, and in turn we are not involving the students when we discuss curriculums and courses. I have proposed more openness, but those in power tend to oppose it. Secrecy is a way of keeping a tighter grip on that power.
I don't mean to imply that mods had bad intents with the closed mods list. Just pointing out the dangers of not having full transparency. If the membership had seen the takeover 2 weeks ago when it was presented on he mods list maybe it could have been stemmed much earlier.
Finally, it might be good to consider some examples how other on-line communities of "like minded" are run. (With like minded I mean sharing the very much non-mainstream nature of many members apparent in e.g. Big Moose's statement that the value of my oscilloscope exceeds that of my car. Or Methods wedding pictures with him on the ebike and the bride in the bike trailer!)
Here are three examples:
First, I'm a member of a completely non-commercial list for VW (camper) bus owners, (called Vanagon in the US, Transporter or Caravelle elsewhere in the world). Certainly an alternative group of people also.
Similar to ES the list was first run and administered by a single person. Eventually membership, size of archives and the time involved became too much. At that time an open discussion of what to do next was started on the list and it was agreed to continue without commercial involvement. Members donated and a server was bought. This server has been circulating between various places, and hooked up to use spare bandwidth of members/admins who can get that for free through their workplace or business. Thus all content is on hardware that clearly belong to the members. The whole thing was very inexpensive. Donations were typically $10-100, and total collected is only in the order of thousands.
The list was started in 1994. Since then many privately owned or commercial vw bus lists and web sites have been started (sometimes spawned by members of the original list). While these had much fancier visuals (and ads of course!), the text-only based original mailing list survived despite its primitive format. Many of the original members from 1994 are also still there. Total membership has been very stable at around 800 during the past decades.
So this model of communal list ownership seems very stable and durable.
As a second example, Peter Perkins pointed to how Insigtcentral (for owners of the Honda Insight) was commercialized some years ago.
AFAIK this caused many grievances, but the list is still there. It was converted to vBulletin to allow more prominently placed ads, which many members were irritated by. Perhaps Peter can comment on how he thinks the value of the list has changed.by peterperkins » Sat Aug 06, 2011 8:57 pm
Sadly i've seen this all before with http://www.insightcentral.net a few years ago
The third example I wanted to bring up is Instructables. This site started with a creative membership which (much like us) like to make things, often from recycled materials. At first the site was free and everyone had equal access. Eventually the site was "monetized". Increasing number of ads appeared, and one had to pay for "premium membership" to access full instructions. This caused uproar. The situation is similar to what we would have faced on ES: Volunteers contribute content, while owners earn the reward from ad placement (estimated at around $2million/year for Instructables based on web statistics and usual ad rates).
The breaking news for Instructables is that it has now taken a third step into commercialization. It was bought by Autodesk last month. Autodesk makes programs that creative people use such as Photoshop, Autocad, Maya. I use the latter two for 3D modeling here at school. Now Autodesk is not interested in the ad income from instructables. 2 million is a drop in the bucket for them. They are interested in the amount of control over the members they can gain from owning instructables. This can be illustrated by an example. Before members used to creatively put together things from cheap electronic components or recycled parts. One memorable "instructable from years ago showed how to make a recumbent using only hand tools by recycling a mixte frame bike and a kids bike.
The new use of instructables will according to the web announcement support a completely different creativity (from their web site):
http://www.instructables.com/id/Autodesk-Acquires-Instructables-What-It-Means-for/step8/Homestyler/
Autodesk are releasing "free(*)" (note the "*") versions of their softwares for various type of modeling and art. Members use this software and contribute creative projects directly into the Autodesk owned database. What an amazing business idea. Take hostage of one of the biggest on-line communities of creative designers from engineers to artist and then end up controlling the work they submit. Autodesk can mine this material for ideas, probably change whatever EULA comes with the site when they want to (just like your phone company or credit card)
So of the three examples which one do we want? For me it is clear that number one is the only safe and reasonable choice. Note that number two can always be turned into number three at the will of the owner(s), but number one can be constructed in a safe way.
Martin
