Quick update: The previous Github repo has now moved to its permanent home at https://github.com/mucommunity/mucommunity. Prototyping is underway and I hope to have something worth showing off tomorrow-ish.
@purldator Glad it was a simple understanding. Not a problem.
Now, to business:
@purldator said:
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The website is open source. No smoke or mirrors. Everything edited is documented and can also be reverted. Changes made are seen, issues are discussed and there's a good level of transparency, just enough.
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It won't disappear if the current host suddenly disconnects. This is how I felt with WORA when someone told me it went under. The code board was indispensable but not even Wayback could archive it since a login was required to view. If the source is always on GitHub then someone else can easily take it and sync it somewhere else. Where it is hosted for public consumption really has no serious bearing.
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It's all static files so it's easier to load and easier to maintain and easier with security. Especially if a CDN was involved eventually so anyone, no matter their geo-location, could readily access it. (It also helps with google pagerank; that's one key to getting proper 'exposure' out in the online-wild.)
This is all very similar to what we are working on with MUCommunity. Not only is the site open source, but we're using a platform-as-a-service provider that's deeply linked in with the source; no server administration, merged changes automatically deploy, and pull request branches get a temporary staging version of the site to preview the changes. Along with having a robust list of people with merge access, this should fully alleviate both the "take my ball and go home" factor and the "hit by bus" factor.
While I'm a big fan of static websites when able, this doesn't seem like a good fit for that to me, because we want to collect ever-changing statistical data that would be a pain to maintain in static files. Databases are good at this sort of thing and we should use them. However, as discussed in our Mandate/Charter topic, the expectation will be that all user contributions are Creative Commons-licensed. That will allow us to easily publish all of the site's data in an API/machine-readable format (both on-demand, and possibly publishing privacy-sanitized DB dumps, similar to Wikipedia).
This doesn't really necessarily address the 'federated identity' problem at all, but it is an essential component of what I want to build for MUCommunity.org to ensure that it's not something that dies with me (or my interests).