The Just Hire WebChuckWeb Solution

What is this page?

This is a page articulating a proposed solution to JA-SIG's web presence needs, a way to rapidly, effectively, and sustainably make progress by throwing a modest amount of money at this problem.

What is this solution in a nutshell?

Andrew's pitch for this solution

The solution I'd like to see us take to keeping up on the website is to simply outsource it to ex-Uniconer and friend of mine Chuck Crandall at WebChuckWeb. Hosting with better uptime than the Princeton infrastructure. Drupal. Professional design and full-service website updating and hosting.

http://www.webchuckweb.com/

Want an updated announcement news item? Well, Drupal is a good, usable CMS, so people wouldn't feel so stressed interacting with it to add news, but with Chuck's full service hosting, forget that worrying about logging in stuff. Jonathan Markow, or you, or me, or whoever's legitimately needing to change the website, would just email Chuck, and he'd just do it, under some reasonable SLA.

It would be a lovely, productive solution. Enough with this requirements gathering and RFP writing stuff. Let's just write a suprisingly affordable check to WebChuckWeb and this whole problem ongoingly goes away in a compelling way. In time for the conference no less.

Just think, an RSS feed of JA-SIG newsletters...

With Chuck just making website wizardry happen, we'd always seem to be ahead of the game on the website.

The solution is to simply hire WebChuckWeb to implement JA(-)SIG.org and uportal.org as Drupal-implemented WebChuckWeb-hosted full-service websites, providing design, information architecture, development (branding, images, skin, any modest customizations that fall out of this), implementation, hosting, content updating, and website maintenance ongoingly in an iterative, sustainable manner.

JA-SIG allocates money – some larger up-front cost to make the transition out of JA-SIG-hosted Hypercontent, and some ongoing maintenance funding to pay for hosting, content updating, and iterative ongoing architecture, design, and further development.

This won't be enough money to boil the ocean immediately, or even to meet all of our requirements immediately. Rather, it will be enough money to get into a successful maintenance stream whereby we have a solid website that's staying up to date, being maintained, and is going places – slowly but surely becoming better.

What are the details behind this idea?

Includes design, visual identity, and information architecture services

JA-SIG needs design services, including colors, logos, more generally a Visual Identity. JA-SIG needs information architecting to make these websites effective. Not coincidentally, WebChuckWeb provides these sorts of services.

Website is a process, not a project

The websites are not projects that we can expect to ever be "done" with. They are an ongoing process. So we need a cost model and a staffing model that provides an ongoing stream of effort to keep up with this process. Buying ongoing services from WebChuckWeb is a way to accomplish this.

Full service hosting

Drupal is an excellent CMS and less-technical people can be expected to be able to put content into it. However, ideally a relationship with WebChuckWeb would allow less-technical people to simply email a WebChuckWeb website professional to say "Hey, I've got an updated announcement about the conference seminars, here it is, could you put it up on the website?"

What problems does this solve?

Need for professionally designed and maintained visual identity
Need for migration into a better CMS
Need for hosting with excellent uptime
Need for content maintenance ("full service hosting")
Need for ongoing development and design as web presence needs expand and change

Openness and licensing considerations

Hosting done wrong is an opportunity for someone to hold our data hostage. We don't want that. Agreement with WebChuckWeb should include provision that a full backup of the RDBMS data and the JA-SIG portions of the hosted file system will be provided to JA-SIG upon termination of the relationship. I don't anticipate this would be a problem.

Likewise, JA-SIG should insist on some appropriate licensing solution, with copyright of IP produced for our website either being owned by JA-SIG and being immediately irrevocably licensed for worldwide, non-exclusive, transferable, use modification and redistribution without limitation back to WebChuckWeb (so that they can realize sane considerations around re-using anything developed for this website) or the other way around, with IP owned by WebChuckWeb and licensed back to JA-SIG so that upon termination of the WebChuckWeb relationship we can re-use everything elsewhere.

Risks of this solution

WebChuckWeb may not want to take this deal

WebChuckWeb might not want to make this deal at the price point JA-SIG is prepared to pay.