It's been a couple of weeks since I posted about this, but I'm at something of an impasse with Miraheze Limited and I don't know what to do. As background, when John had major health issues several years ago, I ended up taking on full financial responsibility over Miraheze, just to keep it running. I was really involved for a couple years, but have generally cut back on my involvement since. Lately, it's just been keeping the finance page updated sometimes. But for the most part, I was not involved; I was often having months between wiki edits -- even longer if you excluded the finance page. I was also contributing $1000-$2000 a year. The most recent change is that since Rob made a There's Nothing Better wiki, I started editing much more frequently.
Basically some of our people got tired of waiting for me to incorporate, and made a nonprofit company called Miraheze Limited in the UK. Cool. Now other people can work on this project that I wasn't really managing. But then, some guy in Spain decided he was going to sue me over some content on the wiki, and throw me in Eurojail. Now, I haven't been managing the project for a while, so I don't even have rights to edit the wiki in question, and I'm not particularly eager to do tourism inside of a Spanish prison. So I think, hey, I have a solution -- let's just transfer all the property to Miraheze Limited, and then they can deal with it and not me. Like, that's what "Limited" means -- limited liability.
Instead, I got a stone wall. Board members still insist that the organization can't own the property because they don't have a bank account open yet. Board members repeatedly saying that they are not (yet) responsible for Miraheze. I basically had to kick and scream to get someone to take down the page -- which, whether or not it was legal content, none of us felt like fighting it. The solution was really simple -- just offer me some sort of contract accepting the donation, and then I could legally say I don't own the property, even though my name is still on the account for the time being. But instead I got insults about how I was mismanaging things. OK.
So it comes down to this. I cannot trust Miraheze Limited. I know it has a lot of people who were involved in the community for a long time. But to basically take your biggest donor and give him a big "fuck you" doesn't give me confidence in the long-term viability of the wiki. So my first inclination is to not transfer the property to Miraheze Limited, ever. It feels like taking the ball and going home -- especially on a project I don't contribute much to -- but my concerns about the management are real and unlikely to go away. I don't know who would be actively running the wiki in this case, where Miraheze and Miraheze Limited go their separate ways. I could probably throw some time in, but I'm not a true sysadmin.
The other alternative is to just stop caring and walk away. Transfer the servers to Miraheze Limited, and let them figure out how to pay for them. It's similar to what I was doing before, that's for sure, and the community seems to be leaving without me. I don't know that I could run it on my own either, so just let them make their own mistakes instead of making mine. But I still don't trust them, and all that money I had pledged is never going to see the light of day. And I'm not sure how well they'll be able to find money on their own.
You guys are the community I care about, so I'm asking you what I should do. I'm not sure how long the wiki survives down either path, to be honest.
Basically some of our people got tired of waiting for me to incorporate, and made a nonprofit company called Miraheze Limited in the UK. Cool. Now other people can work on this project that I wasn't really managing. But then, some guy in Spain decided he was going to sue me over some content on the wiki, and throw me in Eurojail. Now, I haven't been managing the project for a while, so I don't even have rights to edit the wiki in question, and I'm not particularly eager to do tourism inside of a Spanish prison. So I think, hey, I have a solution -- let's just transfer all the property to Miraheze Limited, and then they can deal with it and not me. Like, that's what "Limited" means -- limited liability.
Instead, I got a stone wall. Board members still insist that the organization can't own the property because they don't have a bank account open yet. Board members repeatedly saying that they are not (yet) responsible for Miraheze. I basically had to kick and scream to get someone to take down the page -- which, whether or not it was legal content, none of us felt like fighting it. The solution was really simple -- just offer me some sort of contract accepting the donation, and then I could legally say I don't own the property, even though my name is still on the account for the time being. But instead I got insults about how I was mismanaging things. OK.
So it comes down to this. I cannot trust Miraheze Limited. I know it has a lot of people who were involved in the community for a long time. But to basically take your biggest donor and give him a big "fuck you" doesn't give me confidence in the long-term viability of the wiki. So my first inclination is to not transfer the property to Miraheze Limited, ever. It feels like taking the ball and going home -- especially on a project I don't contribute much to -- but my concerns about the management are real and unlikely to go away. I don't know who would be actively running the wiki in this case, where Miraheze and Miraheze Limited go their separate ways. I could probably throw some time in, but I'm not a true sysadmin.
The other alternative is to just stop caring and walk away. Transfer the servers to Miraheze Limited, and let them figure out how to pay for them. It's similar to what I was doing before, that's for sure, and the community seems to be leaving without me. I don't know that I could run it on my own either, so just let them make their own mistakes instead of making mine. But I still don't trust them, and all that money I had pledged is never going to see the light of day. And I'm not sure how well they'll be able to find money on their own.
You guys are the community I care about, so I'm asking you what I should do. I'm not sure how long the wiki survives down either path, to be honest.
"Kitto daijoubu da yo." - Sakura Kinomoto