h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Nuff said.

I'm with you, Dr Zen.

Yes.

Me too. I dropped a line to Nick Reynolds with some questions, to work out if the BBC would consider such an option. Money questions, site stats questions, questions about what help the BBC could give along the road to independence.

Makes total sense to me. Think how much of the work volunteers already do. The technical stuff would be complex, but not insurmountable, I am sure

Whoami

Ah, OK, so my name isn't blocked by the wordkiller. But something was...

Ideally we need to get a proper proposal and then a meeting together.

I say let's give it at least a day to find out what details come out of the BBC. We can't plan a strategy without knowing the basics. There's no strategy, for example, if they won't take less that half a million for it - we're priced completely out of the market.

The only way we can do something is if the BBC decide to gift it to us as a Community (or sell for a minimal cost). Until that decision is made there is no point in getting heavily into planning.

If it doesn't get to that stage it means that h2g2 has sufficiently impressed someone to the point that they will pay to take it off the Beeb's hands. We're onto a winner either way, then.

Present. Not being a techie, I am not sure how much I can help in that department. But I do a better than average job with PR and have several success in that area which Dr. Z and some of you are aware of.

I'm with you - though I'm not sure the Communist model will work.

yep, me too.
Can offer techie skills related to the backend management of the site (ie the database, server and web servers) and willing to put hand in pocket.
We'd need to get a technical outline of the system - some sort of design document - to see how exactly it is put together at a technical level.

I would imagine some work would need to be done around login since that it is all hooked into the BBCiD thingy - and this would be a structural as well as coding issue.
Can't really look too deep at hosting till we have an idea of the size and design of the system we'd want them to host.

vive la revolution!

erm, I meant yes yes yes! I don't know how I can help, but I am an extra pair of hands.

mini mouse

Excelsior the Trekkie has dealt with stroppy servers before, he might be able to help if the situation arose in the distant future.

The main thing I can see is getting the BBC to relinquish control of the EG, without that the new site is worthless

Yes.

Whether or not I can contribute in a helpful way remains to be seen, but I am willing to try.

Me too. Probably whether I like it or not.

"The main thing I can see is getting the BBC to relinquish control of the EG"
Well, that'd be all part of the negotiations.
Initially I see no reason why H2G2 departing the BBC should mean the BBC can't have some sort of negotiated access to content. Might even help in some ways...

At the moment, the system is integrated with bbc as far as i can tell. Moving the system fully away from the beeb would involve a fair amount of work to extricate it.

However, also as far as i understand things, h2g2 is built on a version of the Zend framework, so it's not exactly rocket science.

Technically wise, yeah I could do that.

What you need to understand though, taking this on would be a case of being able to do it in your spare time. This would need a core team of full time staff looking after it.

From what I saw of the offical announcement they were wanting H2G2 to be taken off their hands as an entity.

If the site were to be taken out of the BBC site by the BBC, do we know how much time would be needed to simply maintain it?

It would need full time programmers etc. to change anything, but if if that initial stuff were done (as the BBC would have to do for any potential buyer), what could we get away with doing?

Sorry Pastey - simi post. Would we be able to do it in a 'cloud' way, with a say 20 of us volunteers taking the place of one full time member of staff? Or would we have to find a way to pay staff costs?