hogwash!: [theforum] Donation Wall - last chance to comment

Elfur Logadóttir elfur at elfur.is
Fri Aug 22 15:49:21 CDT 2003


.| From: Russell Griechen
.| >
.| The webmonkey experience was typical of the turf wars.
.| But looking at it from a historical and 'lessons learned' 
.| point of view...Dan was the innovator...try this...try that. 

again Russell, your facts are all wrong, far too wrong to even bother to
correct you, but i'm still going to.

the revolt that became evolt.org came about after a group of people
repeatedly asked for open archives of the webmonkey mailing list. after
waiting for probably 6 months and getting no response from the webmonkey
team, dan decided to post his own collection of webmonkey emails as a
temporary webmonkey archive, until the real thing would be launched.
this was his way of giving back to a community that had helped him on
numerous occasions.

the legal eagles over at lycos, that had recently acquired wired at the
time, decided that they didn't like the fact of open archive, especially
not one that they couldn't control and possibly sell advertisements on,
and therefore requested that dan would take the archive down.

it was just as much the way they asked as the request itself that
ignited the community disapproval which lead to 35 people getting
together off[wm]list developing what would become evolt.org. so you see,
the fact that lycos had possibly intended to have public archives with
ad space, was a big pet peeve of ours and became one of evolt.org's
criteria ... in a 'for the people, by the people' way, with no
commercialism at all - to prove to the world, that a big web community
could be run without selling every corner to the highest bidder. (i'm
not claiming that wired did, but we wanted to make sure that our new
community never would).

there was not one founder - there were about 25-30 - there was not one
leader - there were about 25-30 - most of whom were equal contributors
of different aspects of the development, some visible, others behind the
curtains.

after launch of the evolt.org project those 25-30 people worked really
hard to keep it together, as it grew bigger and at the same time because
of the great understanding and appreciation of dan's employers the load
on him got bigger than many others, this we tried to change, but
probably came about it in a completely wrong way, which gradually lead
to dan's departure.

so here's me mourning dan's departure, but still claming that your facta
is wrong russell, non-commercial model was one of the cornerstones of
evolt.org's creation and is what seb was referring to. oh, and by the
way, seb is included in the list of 25-30 i mention above, not that he
needs defending at all, his work speaks for itself.

cheers
elfur
an active member of evolt.org from day one whose name you probably don't
recognise either.




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