Current Infrastructure Setup

[David Recordon]

Hey all,
I helped get the current infrastructure setup, so this will be a bit
of a brain dump of where things stand.

Web hosting - We are sharing the OpenID.net server at the OSU OSL.
Right now the OSU OSL is working on taking over management of this
server, moving to shared hardware, etc which will be a really nice
step forward. I think we'll be able to continue having them host the
site and get anyone who needs it setup with SSH/SFTP access.

Content management - The current site is built on Movable Type (yeah,
I work for Six Apart) which has been fine so far. I think that we
need to build out more content which is easy to do as things are
currently setup.

Mailing lists - We use Google Groups.

Email - We don't have any.

SVN/Git - We don't have any repos.

Domain - The domain is currently owned by Google – thank you Google
for buying it! – which we will want to transfer to the Foundation at
some point.

DNS - I think DNS is also managed by Google, but we can move it to the
OSU OSL.

Wiki - We don't have one, but probably should. Chris Messina has one
registered on PBWiki.

What am I missing?

Obviously the wiki discussion kicked off the formation of this
committee (let's create a new thread for it) and I'm guessing that SVN/
Git will be the next piece needed once we setup the incubator.

--David

[DeWitt Clinton]

Quick clarification -- the openwebfoundation.org domain is owned by Dylan Schiemann. We didn't work out any formal arrangement with Dylan to use it -- we just asked and he agreed. If it matters we should probably sit down with him and work something out.

Google acquired openweb.org, which we're happy to donate as soon the foundation is ready to use it.

-DeWitt 

[Nathan DiNiro]

Hey Dave,

When do you think OSL will have the infrastructure project completed?

-Nate

EM: uncl...@gmail.com
TW: @unclenate
PH: 503-449-9943

On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 10:37 AM, David Recordon <reco...@gmail.com> wrote:

[James Tauber]

Partly in the interests of full disclosure and partly just to people
know to send me their thoughts, I'm interested in building a Pinax[1]
edition that would be suitable for things like committees and working
groups.

We're not there yet and I'm certainly willing to help out with with
OWF and individual project infrastructure regardless of whether Pinax
is involved at all, but I just wanted to let people know I am on the
look out for requirements (and even contributors, but that would best
be taken offline)

James

[1] http://pinaxproject.com/

[David Recordon]

Hopefully within the next few weeks.

[Brendan Quinn]

Hi folks

This all sounds pretty good so far. I think we need to work out pretty quickly what the likely tenant standards group would want from our shared infrastructure -- a wiki, a repository, maybe a web CMS if they aren't happy running everything from a wiki (movable type sounds fine to me), email lists (does google groups do domain hosting?), maybe IRC servers and/or apache/W3C-style bots to record conversations and provide updates, some kind of collaboration platform if needed...

and after we have a candidate set of technologies for tenant standards groups, we should do the dog-food thing [1] and use the same tech to run the openwebfoundation.org site.

To James's point about Pinax: right now I would be wary of using anything that isn't very bog-standard [2] and uncontroversial -- at this stage in the organisation's existence we want to be seen to be all about open standards and not about promoting particular systems that are run by committee members.

What does everyone else think?

Brendan.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_one%27s_own_dog_food
[2] http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bog_standard - sorry for the Englishisms creeping in there! I've obviously been living here too long..

2009/8/4 James Tauber <jta...@jtauber.com>

[Eran Hammer-Lahav]

I would like to suggest we focus on the current need for a foundation wiki. Something to keep membership information, bylaws highlights, and FAQ. The committee is chartered to fulfill requirements from the board and other committees and it is better that it does not guess on what the needs are.

 

EHL

[David Recordon]

Agreed, I think that a wiki is the most pressing need.

[James Tauber]

Just as a straw man proposal, are the any issues with just going with
pbworks for now?

James

[Simon Phipps]

I've not used PBWorks before - is it built on an open source wiki that
we could deploy on our own infrastructure in the future? As a general
principle I believe all our infrastructure should have that as a
minimum requirement.

S.

[Eran Hammer-Lahav]

I would also add that it should allow easy export of the entire database.

EHL

[Anthony Broad-Crawford]

PBWorks allows for export, however, only as a premium feature.  Their standard edition will get us this feature @ $8 dollars a person

http://pbworks.com/business-pricing.wiki

Anthony Broad-Crawford
www.anthonybroadcrawford.com
www.twitter.com/broadcrawford

This email is:   [ X ] bloggable    [ ] ask first   [  ] private

[James Tauber]

Any other options people want to throw into the ring for the wiki?

Selection criteria mentioned so far (which we may or may not all agree
on) have been:

- ability to easily export the entire database
- open source
- ability to deploy on our own infrastructure

If we host ourselves, another criterion would be:

- familiarity to people who are willing to setup and maintain it

So far these are mostly non-functional requirements. Is there
particular functionality we need that might narrow our choices as well?

James

[Christian Crumlish]

I'm partial to hosting it ourselves with mediawiki or better.

Sent from my iPhone

[Mike Malone]

I'm also partial to self-hosting, especially if we can't find a free hosted version that meets our requirements. MediaWiki is probably more than we need, but I've set it up before and it's not particularly difficult.

Mike

[Christian Crumlish]

Also, because of Wikipedia more people know that particular syntax, and because it's widely adopted it should be easier to find people with experience skinning or otherwise configuring the software. I've used others, wakka, moinmoin, etc., and I'm not religious if someone has a preference and wants to just get going, but if we self-host then getting data in and out is trivial.

-x-

--
Christian Crumlish
I'm writing a book so please forgive any lag
http://designingsocialinterfaces.com

[Ben Ward]

On 5 Aug 2009, at 10:01, Mike Malone wrote:

> I'm also partial to self-hosting, especially if we can't find a free
> hosted
> version that meets our requirements. MediaWiki is probably more than
> we
> need, but I've set it up before and it's not particularly difficult.

Agreed with this. I'm responsible for the MediaWiki install that we
run on microformats.org and whilst I do find its ugly architecture and
legacy aspects of the codebase quite frustrating—my Twitter stream
will attest to this—it does work well.

It's not especially complex to configure, has a huge library of
extensions and community plug-ins, and gets well maintained and
promptly patched against security vulnerabilities.

Microformats.org augmented version is briefly documented here: http://microformats.org/wiki/wiki-2
. I'm happy to consult with anyone as to how we achieved it, and can
likely lend some time to assist with the deployment if required.

Regards,

Ben

[Nate]

What about something along the lines of an intranet?

Nate

On Aug 5, 11:39 pm, Ben Ward <b...@ben-ward.co.uk> wrote:
> On 5 Aug 2009, at 10:01, Mike Malone wrote:
>
> > I'm also partial to self-hosting, especially if we can't find a free  
> > hosted
> > version that meets our requirements. MediaWiki is probably more than  
> > we
> > need, but I've set it up before and it's not particularly difficult.
>
> Agreed with this. I'm responsible for the MediaWiki install that we  
> run on microformats.org and whilst I do find its ugly architecture and  
> legacy aspects of the codebase quite frustrating—my Twitter stream  
> will attest to this—it does work well.
>
> It's not especially complex to configure, has a huge library of  
> extensions and community plug-ins, and gets well maintained and  
> promptly patched against security vulnerabilities.
>
> Microformats.org augmented version is briefly documented here:http://microformats.org/wiki/wiki-2
> . I'm happy to consult with anyone as to how we achieved it, and can  
> likely lend some time to assist with the deployment if required.
>
> Regards,
>
> Ben
>
> > On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 8:47 AM, Christian Crumlish <
> > christian.cruml...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >> I'm partial to hosting it ourselves with mediawiki or better.
>
> >> Sent from my iPhone
>

[Nate Benes]

Twiki is kind of the 300 pound gorilla of the wiki scene but it does have quite a bit over mediawiki and last I knew that's what Mozilla's knowledge base was running.  That's my two cents...

Nate
na...@grapepudding.com

[DeWitt Clinton]

This is in more able hands than mine now, but if I had any advice to contribute it would be that we find a hosted solution.  Running your own servers is so early-2000's.

-DeWitt

[Christian Crumlish]

I'm fine with hosting if interoperability is there and we can get all the data out (for backup and migration).

On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 3:03 PM, DeWitt Clinton <dcli...@gmail.com> wrote:

This is in more able hands than mine now, but if I had any advice to contribute it would be that we find a hosted solution.  Running your own servers is so early-2000's.

 

[David Recordon]

I also would prefer a hosted solution. Right now the only hosting we
need to do is for the website. Google Groups isn't built on open
source, but works really well.

I would lean toward PBWiki or if we prefer MediaWiki then using
http://www.wikia.com/.

--David

[Christian Crumlish]

any reason to avoid SocialText? (I'm also ok with PBwiki or really anything...)

[David Recordon]

Nope, no reason. I'm most familiar using PBWiki and the other
preference expressed was MediaWiki which SocialText does not run.

[Nate Benes]

If we are going with a hosted solution for now I think PBwiki would be my preference.  As far as socialtext goes, (correct me if I'm wrong)  it seems more intranet oriented and less wiki oriented.  Ultimately it comes down to a question of whether we want to roll our own and stick with open-source or go with a simpler hosted app.

Nate
na...@grapepudding.com

[James Tauber]

Did we establish how easy it would be to export from pbworks for backup / migration later on?

If that's not problematic, I'm +1 on pbworks 

James

[David Recordon]

Agreed with James.  Chris?

--

Sent from my iPhone

[Chris Messina]

I'm not a fan of the SocialText user experience. I find it cumbersome
and clunky — and it tries to do everything. To Nate's point, it's more
all-in-one intranet focused, as opposed to a building block solution.

I setup the initial PBWorks wiki and got a premium account compted for
us (i.e. Backup is included).

I've used PBWorks for the OpenID, Portable Contacts, OAuth, Diso and
Activity Streams communities successfully. It has decent user
management tools, supports OpenID, email and RSS notifications and a
friendly user interface.

While I've used MediaWiki in the past, I find it excruciating to use
and is certainly not something that I'll avail myself to maintain. If
we're going to self-host, we need to have people who are going to sign
up to be reliable and available to keep the system running — and to
deal with abuse, spam and other issues that often plague community
efforts.

In many respects, I personally could care less about the technology as
long as it's easy to use, fairly easy to customize (to a reasonable
degree), gets out of my way and doesn't have too many idiosyncrasies
that new folks struggle to get their heads around just to get started.

Of course we all have our favorite tools and I'm all about self-
hosting software where it makes sense — but in so much as the OWF is
about a bigger goal than just managing software, I think that
maintaining our own self-hosted tools is secondary to the broader
goals of protocol and format development.

Chris

On Aug 7, 3:51 pm, Nate Benes <n...@grapepudding.com> wrote:
> If we are going with a hosted solution for now I think PBwiki would be my
> preference.  As far as socialtext goes, (correct me if I'm wrong)  it seems
> more intranet oriented and less wiki oriented.  Ultimately it comes down to
> a question of whether we want to roll our own and stick with open-source or
> go with a simpler hosted app.
>
> Nate

> n...@grapepudding.com

>
>
>
> On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 5:49 PM, David Recordon <record...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Nope, no reason.  I'm most familiar using PBWiki and the other
> > preference expressed was MediaWiki which SocialText does not run.
>

> > On 8/7/09, Christian Crumlish <x...@pobox.com> wrote:
> > > any reason to avoid
> > > SocialText? (I'm also ok with PBwiki or really anything...)
>

> > > On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 3:11 PM, David Recordon <record...@gmail.com>

[Christian Crumlish]

sounds like we're converging on pbwiki? that's fine with me. I have vague memories of some change to their terms or something that people were upset about but I gather that wasn't a big deal? Can we get data back out in a pinch. If the answer to that is yes, I think we have rough consensus and should steam ahead with the wiki Chris has started.

I'm personally agnostic about the tech we decide to use - my only real bias is toward things more people might already be familiar with or things that are amazingly easier to use than their peers.

-x-

On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 4:30 PM, Chris Messina <chris....@gmail.com> wrote:

I setup the initial PBWorks wiki and got a premium account compted for
us (i.e. Backup is included).

[Anthony Broad-Crawford]

PBWiki has export.  Just have to get the minimum paid plan I believe.

--

[Anthony Broad-Crawford]

https://plans.pbworks.com/index.php

[Nate Benes]

I'm pretty sure Chris said he had that covered already and that it did have backup.

Nate

[Simon Phipps]

I'm still uncomfortable with the idea of using

* a solution which is not open source, given we are a community
dedicated to creating specs for open source use
* a software solution which we can't rehost, either with a different
vendor or on our own systems
* a data solution where the only exit option is to export and refactor
the data

Someone mentioned Wikia (a free, hosted MediaWiki farm) - I'd be
interested in views on it.

We're not the first to walk this way. I found these resources
interesting:
Wiki comparison site: http://www.wikimatrix.org/
Wiki hosting comparison: http://editthis.info/wiki/Wiki_hosting_comparison_guide
and finally http://wikiindex.org/WikiFarm

S.

[Chris Messina]

Correct -- as I said, I have a premium plan setup for the OWF. It's up to us whether we use it.

Chris

Sent from my iPhone 2G

[Ben Ward]

On 7 Aug 2009, at 17:14, Christian Crumlish <xi...@pobox.com> wrote:

> sounds like we're converging on pbwiki? that's fine with me. I have
> vague memories of some change to their terms or something that
> people were upset about

I find PBWorks writing experience excruciating these days. Since their
2.0 upgrade they completely removed the wiki shorthand editing
function that has pretty much defined the wiki editing experience
since they were concieved. Instead you're stuck with WYSIWYG, along
with clunky link creation and management, or editing (poorly formatted
and bloated) raw HTML.

It's deeply frustrating, but their service appears to now focus on
being. Wiki for people who don't want to use the word wiki.

Given the bad input format for the data, even exported backups might
not be of ideal worth to us if the data is buried inside bad HTML
rather than a simple wiki/markdown syntax.

I'm all for not having a hosting overhead, but I'd regard shorthand,
text-centric editing as essential.

Can anyone confirm the accessibility of the editing interface from C-
Grade or mobile devices, too?

Ben

[Chris Messina]

On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 7:26 PM, Ben Ward <b...@ben-ward.co.uk> wrote:

I find PBWorks writing experience excruciating these days. Since their
2.0 upgrade they completely removed the wiki shorthand editing
function that has pretty much defined the wiki editing experience
since they were concieved. Instead you're stuck with WYSIWYG, along
with clunky link creation and management, or editing (poorly formatted
and bloated) raw HTML.

To be fair, the HTML editor is not that bad, all things considered. It's still just TinyMCE — but I agree that it's output can be atrocious.

Still, it's much more convenient if you're just worried about writing documents rather than worrying about the markup. I still edit my PBWorks pages by hand and it respects my markup.

 

It's deeply frustrating, but their service appears to now focus on
being. Wiki for people who don't want to use the word wiki.

Given the bad input format for the data, even exported backups might
not be of ideal worth  to us if the data is buried inside bad HTML
rather than a simple wiki/markdown syntax.

Markdown would probably be fine — is that something built-in to MediaWiki? Or just available as an extension?

One thing that I was thinking about which favors both MediaWiki and Drupal actually is internationalization support. That is, if we expect to have pages translated to many different languages, both platforms deal particularly well (or better than others at least) with international audiences.

PBWorks has nothing in that regard.

 

I'm all for not having a hosting overhead, but I'd regard shorthand,
text-centric editing as essential.

Can anyone confirm the accessibility of the editing interface from C-
Grade or mobile devices, too?

I believe PBWorks has at least a mobile browsing interface. Not sure on the mobile editing interface — you can create new pages, but from what I can tell, not edit existing ones (lame).

Chris

--
Chris Messina
Open Web Advocate

Personal site: http://factoryjoe.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/chrismessina

Diso Project: http://diso-project.org
OpenID Foundation: http://openid.net

This email is:   [ ] bloggable    [X] ask first   [ ] private

[Christian Crumlish]

I am about to test an iPhone skin for mediawiki (for the social patterns wiki), fwiw. 

Sent from my iPhone

[Nathan DiNiro]

I was doing a little poking into how other projects are set up at OSL and I noticed that we need to be listed here: 

http://osuosl.org/services/hosting/communities

Is it the responsibiltiy of this committee to manage those details, or will a "marketing" and/or "PR" committee be formed?

Perhaps it exists already?

-Nate

EM: uncl...@gmail.com
TW: @unclenate
PH: 503-449-9943

[Nate Benes]

Looks like so far all we have for committees are the legal and infrastructure groups.

Nate