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SoylentNews PBC had a proper business meeting on Friday, to discuss events since the shutdown notice was posted.
This meeting was attended by myself, Matt Angel, and kolie. I was on the phone for about two hours, combined with multiple follow ups in DMs.
Let's get the good news out first.
SN PBC has agreed to continue operations for SoylentNews.
We also had a very long extended discussion on what the future may look like and some points brought up by staff or members of the community were discussed.
Let's cover all the major points below.
Roadmap Moving ForwardWe talked about the state of things to come for over an hour, and then I had one on one calls with Matt and kolie. The conversation was fairly high-level, and mostly consisted of a recap of the last few weeks, current progress, as well as what actually rebuilding the site is going to look like. Right now, we have a commitment to finishing the infrastructure overhaul, and upgrade it as is practical.
That would basically bring us to the "ok for now" status quo ...
However, the status quo does not address the dwindling signal to noise ratios or shrinking community. It does not address the lack of moderation or content standards. It does not address our problems relating to SEO or anything resembling modern human interface guidelines. It also does not resolve the long standing problems that lead to here.
We also had a fairly long conversation on the circumstances that lead to here and how we avoid a repeat of ending back on the brink.
We still have the question of what we will do in the immediate future.
I have no illusion that staff are happy to work with me, but I am hoping we can at least define some sort of formal truce in the name of the future of the site. However, members of the staff have been demanding for me to step down and simply get out.
I have been given the impression that if I was to step down, they would simply continue the site as is. I am unaware of any defined plan relating to fixing any of the problems plaguing the site, both as it is now, and those that have persisted long before this point.
I have also been given the impression that if I do not simply GTFO soon, they're simply going to quit.
That's fair and understandable given everything that has happened.
However, I am not the only stakeholder, as currently, Matt as co-owner, and kolie, as an interested outside party who is actively helping to fix the site, have both indicated that they want me to stay involved at this time.
Ultimately, dealing with the deferred maintenance is going to take priority. Given everything, I don't see how I can have a revised plan for SoylentNews any earlier than July, and realistically I expect it to take longer to have a solid agreement hashed out by all stakeholders.
The staff should be a part of this discussion. However, at this point, they have at this point only made demands, and have made no attempts that I am aware of to negotiate anything. Unilateral demands is not a negotiation.
This is part of a larger problem that, at the end of the day, the staff had no true stake if the site succeeded or failed. This is compounded by the fact that no one has been willing to put themselves forward to join as a member of the board of the directors since mrcoolbp disappeared, and since none are apparently willing to work with me, the person who is both president and 50% owner, well, it leaves us at an impasse.
The easiest thing to do is to allow them to present their case as to why I shouldn't be involved and show to everyone that they can lay out a realistic plan to deal with the issues that have long plagued this website. After all, if they're so insistent that I shouldn't be involved, then as a matter of due diligence, I need them to show a plan that involves fixing the site, and actual work being doing towards it.
For my part, I will do the same in the form of a new business plan for the PBC that will specifically explain why we are taking money in, how we will use it, how we are going to deal with raising capital in the future, and everything else that is involved in keeping SN going for another decade. Such a plan is going to require both kolie and I to discuss the specifics of what replacing rehash is going to require.
At the end of the day, regardless of who was responsible, SN decayed to the point that the database was suffering from corrupted tables. That has to be addressed, and ultimately, until some else steps up to the plate, and presents a workable plan, that falls to me
Infrastructure Rebuild
Of course, talk is cheap, so here's what I have actually done in the last two weeks with help from kolie.
We have been making slow but steady progress on this. The plan is to convert the entire site to an ansible playbook, which now exists. We have successfully started deploying site services on a fresh set of Linode accounts. So far, kolie has got the public wiki rendering, bringing it from MediaWiki 1.18 to a currently supported version.
Meanwhile, I've been digging deeper into rehash. In any scenario that involves the site continuing, we are going to need to be able to deploy code changes. Fortunately, when I did the work to get the site running on Apache 2, I left myself a lot of good notes on how it all works, as well as the "make build-production-environment" target which handles a lot of the worst parts of how to deal with the mountain of legacy Perl.
This is slowly coming together in building a Dockerfile that's on the public rehash repo.
As of writing, I have gotten it to the point it can successfully run the install target. I wrote some rather hacky code that handles shoving connection database information into the system DBIx::Password module, because that's what rehash requires, and I was reminded again why this is the codebase from hell.
We have also had a longer discussion towards implementing new services like status monitoring. A member of the community submitted a long and detailed plan to implement Prometheus for service monitoring. We're not quite ready for that, but we also need to talk about specifically access to the backend.
Infrastructure Access
When I formally announced the shutdown for SoylentNews PBC, I locked out all shell accounts to the backend as well as limited access to the Linode panel. This was done both to protect the site and as a matter of liability. When the circumstances changed, access to the backend was not restored. Access to rehash's administration panel however remained available, which is how janirirok and the other editors have been posting articles. The #chillax channel remains up, although I'm no longer in it.
I didn't restore access after the situation changed. There are quite a few reasons I could give, but given the sheer amount of hostility I have received from certain individual members of the staff, I could not and cannot rule out the possibility that someone would simply "rm -rf /" the production environment out of sheer spite. Also, these machines are going away. There isn't going to be shell access beyond this point aside from a control node.
Right now, the current plan is to simply get the site back to the level of functionality it had back in November, with as many parts of infrastructure being fully up to date as-is possible. This includes going through the configs, removing obsolete bits, and basically reviewing every aspect of the underlying nuts and bolts.
I am going to be taking a solid look at getting rehash ported to the current versions of Apache 2.4 and mod_perl. It mostly depends how much of the stack can be built on mod_perl 2.4 easily. At least with the site on deployable infrastructure, it drastically simplifies what it will take to move forward.
Timeline Moving Forward
Fixing SN is going to require people to be involved and dedicated to rebuilding and essentially relaunching the site as well as fixing many of the problems that have led to here.
To ask that without providing some sort of compensation is folly but without a defined plan, well, we end up in a catch-22 situation.
So, here's what I'm going to do and what I am going to ask of anyone who stays involved.
We will have the site migrated to less broken infrastructure by the end of June at the latest, and likely well before that point.
After that migration is complete, kolie and I are going to negotiate a contract that will handle either overhauling or outright replacement of rehash. This agreement is going to define any new functionality that will be built into what will essentially be version 2 of this website.
We also need to define what specifically is the role of various volunteers in the upkeep of this site, as well as defining our options in case we ever end in another situation like this five or ten years down the road.
If there's one thing I have surmised, no one is happy with this situation, but a big part of moving forward is having an agreement on how it will be maintained and have some flexibility going forward.
A major point of this is growing SoylentNews's cash flow to the point that it can reasonably afford to have at least one paid staff member and provide some actual incentives to keep people involved in its upkeep and overall maintenance.
I have quite a few ideas on how to approach this, but I rather have a chance to write them out in-depth and explore them.
As part of this, I also want to deal with raising the overall signal to noise ratio, increasing the number of comments per article, and hopefully bringing in new blood to the site. It's very hard to have any idea as of the state of the health of the community as we don't have any analytics, and have historically only ever run PiWik for a short period of time.
I think we need to consider doing that again, if only to have an idea of where we are in terms of actual readership and engagement.
Finally, there needs to be a reason why someone might post inbound links to SoylentNews, and once someone clicks on them, sticks around longer than a few seconds. That also makes finding such content easier for both humans and search engines.
These are just some ideas off the top of my head. Realistically, I'm going to need to sit with a pen and paper, sound out which ones are practical with kolie and Matt, and then start taking steps to implement them, with whomever is willing to join us going forward.
I will keep you all posted,
~ NCommander
(Score: 5, Insightful) by darkfeline on Tuesday June 06, @02:15AM (8 children)
That's all well and good but:
1. Do you have a plan as NCommander asked?
2. NCommander is the legal owner (+/- the other owners/the LLC) So yes, he has the final say despite any effort the staff put in, and he is ultimately liable for everything, both for the site failing and any lawsuits that may arise from security issues.
Yes, NCommander is responsible for everything. And so what? It doesn't change reality.
He is perfectly in the right to decide to shut down the site that he fucked up himself, and the community has no say otherwise.
Therefore, it is very reasonable of him to ask for a plan from the staff/community, when he has no obligation to do so. Whether he fully owns up on any blame he may have had for the site's state is completely irrelevant. The staff winning the argument does not save the site. NCommander winning the argument does not save the site.
Come up with a plan, then we talk.
I might add, while you're pointing fingers, kolie actually stood up and did something. From the perspective of someone who has surface-level involvement with SN, you are proving NCommander's claim that all you do is try to shift blame without any action or plan to back it up.
You wrote a novel of a post blaming NCommander (whether rightly or wrongly), but not a word on how to fix the site. I hope that achieved whatever you wanted it to achieve.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 5, Informative) by janrinok on Tuesday June 06, @05:32AM (7 children)
We couldn't agree more. He will not speak with us. We are locked out of the hardware. He will not come to IRC (where all similar discussions have been held historically.) If you visit there you can join in. He is not listening to anybody - It isn't just us. He will not allow us to repair the damage to the existing site while he builds a new one elsewhere.
We are working on getting the site to rebuild with up-to-date software, and making good progress. We are looking at alternative infrastructures, alternative code, and alternative overarching management structures. And currently we are doing this with our own resources. And if we change anything, then it should be with the community's agreement not because one person says so.
Why do we have to be a PBC? With the exception of the Treasurer, the Board has had no significant input in the management of this site for many years. They are not even following their own rules regarding the Board's composition with posts being empty for years. It is rather a device that someone is using to say he has more rights than anybody else. It didn't used to be this way. A small group of community members, rotated from time to time, could achieve far more than a nebulous Board.
This site has been built by many people, willingly and freely. It has been paid for by the voluntary subscriptions from the community. The staff are all volunteers. I would have thought that Americans in particular would not wish to live under a omnipotent King again, however well intentioned he thinks he is.
This site does not belong to any one individual. Perhaps we could get more attention if we dumped crates of software into the harbour in Boston?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by separatrix on Tuesday June 06, @07:49AM (3 children)
You don't have to be a PBC. But you have to have written rules or they can be changed by the next dictator's whim. Also, you don't get what a board is supposed to be for. It's not supposed to run the day to day -- you call them "staff", which I gather you're a part of. Staff may not be paid, but they do the day-to-day. The board steps in when there's a crisis.
I've already seen you make unwarranted assumptions: you did it to me when I joined and you accused me of wanting a paid position or to be on the board. Here you call a board "a device that someone is using to say he has more rights than anybody else." No. A board for a typical local not-for-profit is elected by its membership. It's supposed to be a democracy.
What you're advocating is a collective, with no hierarchy whatsoever, everything decided by consensus. Before the unfortunate current situation, the site was apparently dwindling in volunteer enthusiasm. Are you sure this is the only form of organization you can imagine for SN?
There's another model. I've written a first post in my journal [soylentnews.org], where I try to lay out my idea about the governance of organizations like this. One problem you currently have is your CEO is on your already-too-small board, which is a no-no:
In other words, a well-constituted board is there for emergencies like this, and to otherwise ensure the proper operation of the staff so that emergencies like this can't happen. They have regular meetings, check the books and numbers, ask for performance evaluations by whoever is in charge. In fact, they should be the ones deciding who's in charge. Frankly, Kolie, even though he's rescuing the site, should submit to a board of directors, or you all run the risk of the same thing happening again.
I agree with darkfeline here: you wrote a novel of a post that did not persuade anyone, including NC, and you're making demands that are hard to distinguish from a monarch's yourself. NCommander isn't the only one to blame; the rest of you let him become a king. I don't want to put my efforts into a site where there's just someone else who's king, either. But the rest of the community have to negotiate a treaty with the old and the new kings first. You are an obvious leader of the rest of the community. Your responses, however justified, are extremely pointed and hostile -- I repeat, however justified, you have to put those aside now, and negotiate. Please. I want to see this site live.
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Tuesday June 06, @08:12AM
You may want to repost your journal because that one doesn't have a reply button. It looks like it contains an open "a href" tag. And link to it again from a comment because otherwise it will go unnoticed.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by dalek on Tuesday June 06, @02:19PM (1 child)
My opinion, for what it's worth, is that SN absolutely needs community governance. As I noted in my journal [soylentnews.org] about creating a privacy policy, any solution needs the support of all three of the main stakeholders: 1) the ownership, 2) the staff, and 3) the community. In my opinion, that means all three need representation on the board, and the bylaws should be structured to require that all three give their approval for site policy. A big part of the problem right now is ownership being dissatisfied with the direction of the site. If staff aren't satisfied with the policies, they can walk away, just like what janrinok has commented about. If the community is dissatisfied, stories don't get submitted, comments don't get posted, and subscriptions don't get purchased. All three of the primary stakeholders need to at least be content with the direction of the site and its policies. In my opinion, all three groups also need to be represented on the board.
In terms of payment, I believe that SN should focus on paying staff who are most critical to the operation of the site. That includes people who are contribute the most to essential site maintenance and the people who edit and post the most stories. The highest paid employee in any business shouldn't be the CEO but rather the employees who really work the hardest and contribute the most to the success of the business. Here, I believe that would be the technical and editorial staff.
Despite what a couple of disruptive trolls say, I haven't buried my journal, and I still encourage comments. I just wanted to discuss some other topics as well that are of interest to me. In about a week, I'm going to post a second journal that solicits comments about the process for approving a privacy policy, with a heavy focus on community governance. I think there's a lot of overlap between the topics, so I ask you to share your thoughts when I post that journal. I'll probably post a motorsports journal sometime around June 9, and the aforementioned journal about community governance would go online around June 12 or 13. I think we may have slightly different ideas about the implementation, but there's a lot of overlap, and I'd definitely value your thoughts on the topic.
EXTERMINATE
(Score: 1) by Sulla on Tuesday June 06, @04:36PM
Take it or leave it, I was wondering about whether the following would be useful if incorporated into a larger plan.
Use a combination of polls and +5 posts from the conversation therein to drive decisions. The poll allows everyone to have their one vote, both AC and user, with the downside that it could be spammed by AC. To counteract that possibility we take the top 5 rated comments from the polls discussion.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 3, Insightful) by darkfeline on Tuesday June 06, @09:10AM (2 children)
IRC is all well and good, but AFAIK SN is the primary forum for the SN community, not the IRC. Perhaps there is a clear plan hashed out in the IRC. I and I wager most of SN have not seen it. If there is a clear plan from the staff, post it here on the site, *instead* of posting about everything wrong NCommander did. *That doesn't matter*. So far only NCommander has posted anything resembling a plan.
Post the plan, and then execute it. Post daily/weekly updates on the execution of the plan.
> if we change anything, then it should be with the community's agreement not because one person says so.
That's the kind of weasel language that is technically right, but more often than not when anyone says it, it is to avoid taking responsibility. "Oh, we didn't do anything, but that's because we wanted to get acceptance from the community!"
Someone has to take responsibility, commit to a decision, and follow through with action. That is what leadership is. For better or worse, NCommander is the only leadership that SN has at the moment.
If the staff actually have the will (gods bless), then present the plan and execute it. Whether that means negotiating with NCommander, or hard forking the organization. If the staff do not want to (or can't) negotiate, then take the code, fork the site, make the negotiations (e.g., to transfer the data) as transparent as possible, and let the community vote with their feet.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 5, Informative) by janrinok on Tuesday June 06, @11:28AM
The problem with this is it will divide the existing community. Our actions resulted from the fact that an announcement was made that the site was closing. We didn't want it to close, We are not in competition with SN - we would much rather it continues with the community intact and the same domain. The fact that one person decided for everybody caught everyone by surprise.
The problem that I have is that one person, and it doesn't matter who it is, can entirely legally close the site down without any consultation with anybody else. That is not the site that we were building in 2014. It is not the site that we have all been part of for many years. separatrix [soylentnews.org] has outlined an alternative [soylentnews.org], and there are probably plenty more variations too.
If we begin to discuss 'another alternative site' when this site has changed direction again and planning to continue then we will only make matters worse. If this site continues then we have to make sure that this situation cannot occur again. We must change the current system where such control is vested in a single person who can act entirely autonomously. Presenting our alternative site now is not going to help resolve that issue.
But, if the site continues in its current direction then some of us feel strongly enough to leave. What we do in that event is as yet undecided. We might create a site that is more democratic, or we may simply say 'goodbye' and wander off into the sunset. That doesn't mean we are telling everyone else to do the same. But if we DO create another site then we will be letting all the members of this community know about it. And we will tell you in clear terms why the new site is different. It will be as we intended this site to be for the last 9 years.
Without those staff this site could be dead within days. This is not intended as an implied threat - it is simply a realistic view of what will happen. Let me take the one example I know most about - the editor's role.There are only 2 regularly active editors. From now on I will edit one story a day because I cannot justify giving 6 hours or more a day to a site that is ignoring me. That means that someone will have to fill that gap. I have stopped searching for and making submissions - that isn't the editor's job. Look how quickly the submission queue is dwindling. An empty submission queue means nothing on the front page. Who will train your new editors? Who will volunteer to join a site that changes its direction with the wind? Do you expect the one remaining editor to process all the stories and then begin training new editors one at a time? How long would you put up with that workload for free?
I have spoken with hubie - our other regular editor. I have apologised to him for the path I am taking. But I have no other options left open to me. I wish it were not the case.
I don't want the community to listen to an alternative site plan and then decide for one or the other. That is divisive.
I want this "we have committed to continuing until Feb 2024/ I am leaving and closing the site / I am staying because it is not my fault / I am handing over but staying in control for the next 5-10 years" to stop. Ask the community. This is their site.
I am sure that the other editors who are already busy with their own professional and personal lives will also help, some already have and I am grateful - but they will not continue if it becomes a chore. For me the current plan of action does not deserve my support. It is becoming a chore. I have not stood down. I have not left. If the community think I am the obstacle then I have said I will go. But I am not working myself to death for a site that doesn't care about its community.
(Score: 5, Informative) by janrinok on Tuesday June 06, @01:17PM
From soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=55814&page=1&cid=1309939#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]
We have already reproduced what we have, and are pressing forward to look at updating it still further. Recreating this site isn't difficult, and what we already have would suffice - it is exactly as you have it today. We can fire it up fairly quickly if necessary. The problem above can be overcome by using mysql instead of mariadb - but they are supposed to be equivalent in this respect. For longer term we are looking at replacing each part of the current system with software either already available or forked and modified for our purpose. There are smaller teams looking at all of these issues.
We didn't know if the SoylentNews domain name was going to be made available or whether we would have to get another. Some domains have already been obtained by community members for us to use should we need to.
We would like to overcome some the the existing limitations though - the hard link to Apache and then getting it to work with the latest version of Perl which quite a few people are trying to do.
The main initial differences of a new site would be in the governance and support areas, and separatrix [soylentnews.org] has some very good ideas in the governance field. However, that is something to be done in conjunction with a community.
This is not just a few staff.