Re: [pgsql-advocacy] National community sites @ postgresql.org?

Hi Nikolay,

I'm so excited that you've brought this up. I'm going to strongly
disagree with the idea of creating a centralized web infrastructure.
Despite the fact that I'm not managing the infrastructure, or really
have much say about what ends up being implemented. :) I do like the
idea of creating DNS redirection to existing community sites to help
out with navigation.

I have spent a lot of time thinking about these issues and researching
things that go wrong in other communities. So please take my feedback
on your idea in that spirit.

On Tue, May 6, 2008 at 2:37 PM, Nikolay Samokhvalov
<samokhvalov(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:

> During Russian community blog/wiki/etc setup process I've realized
> that it's strange that in many countries people do the same things
> separately. It would be much more useful, convenient and simply great
> if we have:
> - one infrastructure to host community sites for any community,
> country-wide or small one, in any language (news, events calendar,
> wiki, forums -- this list is almost everything one might to want to be
> happy);
> - uniform DNS scheme. For country-wide communities it would be great
> to have 3rd level domains delegated to host community sites (e.g.,
> ru.postgresql.org -- this would be GREAT) and maybe ip2geo settings to
> show the notice suggesting proper community site directly on the main
> postgresql.org page.

I like the idea of a uniform DNS scheme that redirects to the
community-hosted sites. At a minimum, we'll need a series of redirect
pages set up to disambiguate when we've got multiple language/regional
groups.

--

I am opposed to the idea of offering *web* integration of all of the
community sites into one massive web infrastructure.

Here's a recent article about the Perl community that illustrates most
of the points that I would make:
http://perlbuzz.com/2008/05/perl-decentralize-diversify-colonize.html

One quote: "Decentralizing and diversifying do two things. First, it
opens our minds to alternatives that we may not have considered. It
makes us more likely to find solutions that are better than what we
started with. Second, it helps with colonization, the ultimate goal."

One way to keep our community vibrant, relevant and authentic is to
encourage communities to host their own stuff, on their own domains.
My view is that postgresql.org should simply be a directory of those
offerings, not the storage mechanism for them.

I realize I'm being inconsistent in offering pugs.postgresql.org - but
in that case, we had a serious lack of user group traction in the US
anywhere other than San Francisco and Portland. I'm also hosting the
Moroccan group - Africa has very few user groups. It is possible to
set up pugs.postgresql.org to properly display most languages. There
haven't been requests for it yet.

My ideal future is that individual user groups become much larger,
spin off and want to host their own stuff and build their own tools.
Then, pugs.postgresql.org will simply redirect to their sites.

I realize that this is not efficient, or ideal from a management
perspective. But developing and sustaining communities is largely
about strong ties between people, rather than careful management of
data. And ties between people are inherently messy.

> Particularly, I'd be glad to put Russian translation of PostgreSQL
> weekly news to this site.

David Fetter, can you work with Nikolay to set this up? Or is this
someone else's area?

-selena

--
Selena Deckelmann
United States PostgreSQL Association - http://www.postgresql.us
PDXPUG - http://pugs.postgresql.org/pdx
Me - http://www.chesnok.com/daily