Thanks! Here’s how I understand it…
Thanks for your insights and kindness, @TCT, very good to meet you. My name is Alberto, a long-time edgeryder.
So: we do have a virtual machine with dedicated cores, but not with Ecobytes – we are hosted by a German company called EuroHosting or something like that. We only met Ecobytes later: @Matthias has decided that a migration was not worth the investment. Perhaps we will take the chance of the next major overhaul of the website to migrate.
As an “advanced Muggle” (don’t develop, can code a little for data manipulation purposes, but not afraid of learning to use tools), I would like to throw in my point of view in this super-interesting discussion, and see what you guys think – that means also @Darren, @mstn and @trythis.
There are two types of extended functionalities: those that are linked to a cultural change (normally the relationship is not one-way: they require cultural change, but at the same time they induce it too), and those that don’t. A markdown editor does not require cultural change, as long as it can be added to WYSIWYG as an extra option; so each person can use the editor she prefers. Getting people to really use wikis, or issue tracking functionalities, or crypto, that’s another story. The power of those tools are in people using them together and at the same time; even within a small community like ours, their value increases superlinearly with the number of users. No point using encrypted mail if none of your friends can receive an encrypted message!
I propose that any tool being rolled out within Edgeryders – if it is connected with cultural change – should come with an explicit effort to (1) explain to the community why they should care about the tool and (2) campaign tirelessly for adoption, over a sustained period of time. By “explicit” here I mean this: that one or more people take personal responsibility for leading the effort.
When @msanti, @danohu and I, at 31C3, fell in love with the Community Crypto idea, the deal was this: they (the geeks) would offer technical support to any edgeryder wanting to embrace it. I would write the instructable, act as alpha tester (if I can do it, anyone can!) and promote community crypto corners at all Edgeryders events. I would be the adoption champion.
That project is stagnating because we could not get Mailpile to work with the edgeryders.eu SMTP server, despite much banging our heads on the wall and pleading with the Mailpile development team (I recently saw that the blog seems to be active again, so maybe there is more hope now). But I stand for the approach: I would hate to waste precious developer time to roll out tools that no one uses… what does everyone think?