[HacktionLab] Fwd: [Newmedia] Fwd: Web server/host advice - as discussed

[yossarian]

On 7/5/11 12:28 AM, penguin wrote:

> This thread has made me think of two things. Wouldn't it be great if ...
> 
> 1. There was a place where different activist / activist supporting
> hosts could be compared to each other on the basis of the services they
> provide?


I have been thinking about this from the perspective of Indymedia London
coding for the past few months.  On the London site, we've got a feature
called "Other Media", which basically allows people to post links to
stuff elsewhere on the web.

We've categorized these links as being broadly either "movement" - say,
Hacktionlab, other Indymedias, Schnews, Noborders, Third Estate, Red
Pepper, blah blah blah - or "corporate" - links to anything else,
including BBC, Guardian, etc.

The interesting thing has been the breakdown of "movement" links.  Many
otherwise very cool political projects do not put any real thinking into
the politics of their hosting arrangements - probably it's never been
raised as an issue that could be regarded as "political".

Or, maybe they've had some random annoying tech person give them a very
long, involved lecture about 100 different technical issues and how
they're doing everything wrong and need to learn how to compile their
own Linux kernel from sources on kernel.org.  In some ways, that kind of
interaction is even more damaging to what we're trying to achieve than
if somebody never thought about this stuff in the first place.

I wonder whether it'd be interesting to come up with a relatively simple
and clear-cut "code of conduct" for radical political hosting - just a
short set of bullet points that people can subscribe to?  Then we could
use it as a communications tool, a way of asking people, "hey, do you
meet the Hacktionlab code of conduct for your hosting?".  Then we can
point people to hosting providers that do meet the code, and explain a
bit about why it's a good idea. Participating sites could put some kind
of badge graphic on their sites, or maybe have a page about hosting.

The reason I say this is that, although I may think they're great, I
have no idea how the servers of various political projects are set up,
and there's no way for me to tell in many cases whether they're hosted
on corporate services, or on self-managed services.  Doing something
like this could be a big boost for self-managed server hosting.

Just an idea, but one I'd be willing to put a bit of work into if
anybody else is also interested,

Yoss