Ning eliminates free networks April 19, 2010

Hi Jeff, all!
Also doing a crosspost from globalvillages to other lists, because the
subject was brought up there also.

The NING message really stroke me. Its not only the Global Villages
Network (globalvillages.ning.com) thats heavily depending on NING, but
also many other networks that I know of and many that I run myself. If I
had to pay for all of them I would go broke. They are fine and useful,
like the Transition Europe and Transition Austria Network and Power Down
and many other sites. They have brought a lot of people together and are
much more useful than Facebook. Facebook is good to attract people, but
its to noise and crowded to do in-depth discussions, store files and do
many other things.

Yes, I think its another kind of wrong dependency of communities on
corporate strategies. Corporate business is more and more depending on the
utilisation and enabling catalyzation of community work and outreach. But
this is happening in a Wild-West manner with Lasso and branding iron, not
in a decent way. What is needed would be  a kind of transitory covenant
for me, and we - the community world - will have to learn the hard way to
only go with the ones that are dedicated and set up for trustworthiness.

I was assuming that there would be a much smoother transition strategy and
not such a "shock therapy " and most likely I will keep only Global
Villages Network on NING if at all. Then we would have to set up
donations. I had a talk with Les Squires today, the mastermind from
Colorado that built so many Transition sites, and they already run
Transition US at a paid base, for 25 $ per months to keep it ad-free. This
is based on donations.

Its also no problem if we are doing this for a commercial client. Then we
can simply charge the costs from the client. I did a project in Mixxt and
received some money for it, and its totally OK in this case to give a
share to the provider. What is not OK is to treat all the cases equally.
The originator of the Austrian constitution, Hans Kelsen, is said to have
said: "you cannot treat unequal things equally". Here comes my critique on
NING.

I thought that the owner and founder
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Andreessen)  was more serious in his
approach, having the financial resources to really do meaningful things
and having supported meaningful non-primarily-profit projects like
Netscape for some time. My trust was even reenforced when I tried to
create my eleventh NING seing that there was a barrier of ten built in to
avoid excess.

I am also ready to pay for services that I value, that is not the
question. I had a time I could afford to support Andrius and the Minciu
Sodas Ecosystem, now the main parts of my resources and the social capital
I can mobilize financewise are taken by Helmut Leitners Wikiservice for my
Dorfwiki. (www.dorfwiki.org)

Here comes the catch. I think that using the vendor-lock-in trick and not
helping people to migrate elsewhere is a variant of blackmail. Helmuts
Wikiservice also is befallen by the "Vendor Lock In Disease" but I suppose
would be fair enough to provide users an exit solution (the raw content of
a Hypertext system exported as textfile by the way is absolutely not
useful, which I saw in the case of Gesunde Erde Gesunde Menschen, = a Wiki
that Helmut turned off for the proponents did not raise resources to pay
for = and they were not able to reconstruct it even when we offered them
ProWiki hosting on our experimental server which for good reasons I do not
want to activate yet).

Of course in the NING case its absolutely clear that they will not provide
any opportunity to port the content. Or at least that would be very
unlikely. From a database programmers perspective providing portability
also is a nightmare. And where should one go, by the way? To facebook?
Unless another service comes up with a content grabber there will be no
chance. And you have to ask people for permission. You would have had to
think of it way ahead.

Currently the resources to pay for all the online venues that we utilize
are dwindling, and its getting harder year by year to support the
respective standards. I am still trying to convince Helmut of the
necessity of fair conditions and he is trying the same with me from his
commercial point of view. We are still far from each other. But in a world
of blind he seems like the one-eyed for me, and he really is passionate
about our content and gives reliable support. I try to find an economic
base together with him that would allow us to provide good and free
services. I say good and free services, including reliability, empathy,
stability and respect.

But there is another side to all this.

I think there comes a great deal of responsibility for hosting other
peoples content, and this responsibility is a cultural one. Our tragedy is
that capitalism is a system of organized irresponsibility on ALL sides,
and we have to experience painfully the absence of truly meaningful
solutions and cultural standards in an age of transition of value creation
from the factory to the individual. We do not reward people for coworking,
and very often they are not ready to pay when they are already thinking
along. Les gave me the exampe of Adam Green who had a very vivid dBase2
newsletter at a time with 10000 subscribers. When he wanted to charge for
it only 3 people were willing to pay for it. Les thinks that 90% of the
existing NING sites might just go under after the move to commercial.
Consider the amount of human labor lost !!!

Coming back to NING, there is an open question of migration that must be
answered.

I found some UNSATISFACTORY answers here:

http://creators.ning.com/forum/topics/the-best-most-reliable-and

The author of that blog post, JP is hyping Spruz, but their advertising is
horrible. I already did a test site.

I think that our community could think allong what are the alternatives to
construct a social network that is closed and open at the same time. If
you want to help please meditate about the list given there and help us
find out about commited providers.

I also include neighboring lists like videobridgebuilders and p2p-research

I dont really think that Facebook and Twitter are so necessary - they are
like booths in front of the house, inviting people in, but there is yet an
inside and an outside.

Les suggests that we might think of Wiser Earth, and, for a very small
financial contribution, to also consider meetup.com. Many groups are just
meetups, not many have extensive online discussions, and they are very
reasonable in user-fee ratio. 70% of Transition sites are mainly using
NING as event announcer.

There is a slight chance on the other hand that we will make a quantum
leap and install one system of our choice on globalvillages.org ourselves.
We have a yet unused server online with 1GB/sec connectivity!

I also think of Andrius and his information ecosystem and wished he would
make his standards of action more understandeable. I had a long discussion
with him last night and it worries me how difficult it is to agree on
terms of usage that make sense for all sides. Its hard to point to the
Mornflake example when the goals of the campaigns were not reached,
because of unrealistic expectations.

I have worked out a whole plan for the Minciu Sodas Information Ecosystem
with Andrius (I must say its one of the most complete maps of an
Information Ecosystem ever conceived) , and some parts of this were
depending on commercial services which is totally understandeable from the
pragmatic point of view. This is still a yahoogroup and Andrius has found
out tremendous ways of integrating an external view to yahoogroups that
could easily be turned into a valuable million dollar service and yet be
free to communities. But most likely Yahoo would prevent that. And Andrius
would most likely not be interested in that either - because he wants
everything that we do to directly foster a culture of independent
thinkers. But I point to him as one of the people who have a lot of great
capacities in the field. I wish someone would bail him out and they would
be able to agree in a meaningful way to use this capacity by agreed
standards.

So here I am - still confused and thinking and trying to make sense and
find ways.

all the best

Franz

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