Thank you people for your kind words, thoughts and the appreciation for what has been achieved - it does mean a lot to me.
Today is the 14th of january, and my first two weeks of 2017 consisted of fairly little but analyzing data, developing ideas based on that data and discussing them with quite a variety of people of different professional backgrounds and different levels of involvement in wikiloops.
"You don't know what you've got till it's gone" is a brilliant line to quote here,
and whatever we do, we should watch out and be sure we are aware which corners of paradise we are paving.
(For anyone not familiar with the song, the next line after the quoted one is "they paved paradise, and put up a parking lot").
I guess it is needless to say that I didn't do what I did to end up with any kind of parking lot.
Even tho it may seem a bit picky, I'd also like to say that I didn't "fund" the fun on wikiloops of the past five years (a wording that sounds as if I had invested cash, which would have been comparably easy to do if you assume I was rich), what I did was give five years of work, heart and brain to create wikiloops.
To me, there is a big difference between "giving" and "investing", as there is between "donating" and "buying".
I have learned that very few people seem to be able to understand the difference and to see why one would be preferrable over the other. That is saddening in a way, but being sad will not save wikiloops either.
As Wade says - there is no use in blaming anyone, and any emotion of the angry kind should be dropped, as it will not lead to any good conclusions.
To deal with the feelings along the lines of "it would have been so easy if-only 500 more people could have been convinced to give 50 bucks" is not easy. But the time thinking "ifs and would haves" is much better spent on saving any inch of paradise we can.
After the efforts taken to communicate the need for support during the past 8 weeks, sadly there is no sufficient reason to hope people will wake up in time or could be stirred by another "rally".
I'm aware that you in your "supporting member" status may have seen little of my efforts asking for help,
but trust me, our call for support was just as obvious as the one offered by the wikipedia, with the difference that I decided not to bug those who already had recently supported.
I couldn't escape the thought that I'd probably be able to run wikiloops for three years on the budget which the wikipedia guys spent on rallying for support in 2016... but these are the kind of thoughts that will not really lead anywhere.
What I see coming are the following steps the wikiloops project will have to take, which I shall try to offer here in a short list.
What seems important to me is to avoid any un-necessary panic and confusion, and also to make sure those who come to rush for help will know which kind of help really makes sense at the time of arrival.
I would hate to frustrate any well-meaning person offering help, so it will be necessary to communicate things carefully.
I cannot tell which of the following steps is the one where you may have the feeling of "and there goes paradise", I guess this will be very different depending on what it is you value about wikiloops.
What I'm trying to prepare you about is that I can't guarantee we will have any option to back out and find a better plan by that time.
If we are to move anywhere near what some called the "obvious solution", the process of getting there will involve more than two months of full-time work on legal paperwork, translations and setting up the gated-access to paradise which seems to be the preffered solution of those who have priorily donated.
There is no capacities on my end to run some kind of "last chance - support wikiloops now or we will move to Plan B" campaign at the same time, and seriously, I would feel bad about asking people to support a free wikiloops while sitting down with the architechts of parking lots behind the scenes.
Let us not have that.
A "saved by the bell three minutes before they would have paved paradise"-scenario would make for a nice hollywood production, but let us please not forget that we would have to pull that off every year.
To be sure anyone reading this is aware of all info I have given, let me repeat here that I already promised to keep wikiloops available to the supporting members, so there is little need for real worry among the group reading this, well, at least as long as you are happy to jam with other supporters only.
Today, all else I can tell you about the next steps is this:
- I'll need a week or two more to seek advice and make sure the "Plan B" which will be presented to the public ideally guarantees to be a long term solution. We could discuss 1001 plan Bs, but without any data to make assumptions on, this will lead nowhere good. I am currently collecting as much data as possible, feel free to request access to that if you really want to spend some hours looking at statistics, trends and assumption-based predictions.
- In the tradition of working together, that Plan B will be presented to you here once it is defined. There may be aspects which might be optional and which we could then have a poll about to it.
- After that feedback cycle with you, I'll need to get to work programming whichever changes will be necessary. A potential need to review the terms of use of wikiloops, and the need to re-word possible wronged indications of "free" on the whole site will require a lot of attention. Even parking lots do not pop up out of nowhere.
- if the terms are changed regarding existing members, all members need to be informed about the change some weeks ahead of time.
- a realistic idea on when the change will take effect might be sometime in april 2017, if all goes well.
Wishing you folks a happy weekend on the loops once more,
I'll keep you updated as good as my time allows.
Edited by
Dick on January 14 2017 09:50
