This morning I was thinking to clarify my intention for the group.
I am very interested in using "online community" as a means for helping the world become a better place. I believe we all have our own idea of making the world a better place, for me it's about giving people a way to come together and talk about ideas. A "forum" is a way to make an "online community", and all that means is we're getting together, we're doing activities together, we share a common purpose or goal, and we get to know one another while we're doing it.
I am very interested in environmental issues and electric vehicles, in case it wasn't obvious. I want to support information and discussion being shared about these issues.
I am interested in these forums being a self sufficient business which pay their own way. I have seen other times this pattern occur, where someone starts an organization, but it's donation based, they eventually lose interest, and abandon the thing they started. Heck, with one of my web sites I almost did the same thing, in that I had built a web site that is the #1 search result in its field, it was (and is) getting a lot of traffic because of that, but it was a lot of work and I was finding it frustrating not having any support ($$$) for that work. And then I found a way to have Google pay me for running the site, and that turned my interest around.
I am alarmed with the news a couple weeks ago that the wild life in the ocean will probably disappear in 50 years, due to over fishing and growing pollution. I am alarmed that my tax dollars and gasoline dollars are going to support a stupid and illegal war in the middle east. I am alarmed that our freedom to choose the kind of vehicle we want to drive is taken away from us because the big car companies want to keep us addicted to oil.
I love the idea of people taking matters into their own hands and building their own things that fit their dreams.
I have a long history with the Internet. I have been using the Internet and other related systems since 1985 or 1986, I've kind of forgotten when I first got connected to it. I have worked in the silicon valley tech industry for a long time.
I see my role as supporting the group to have a voice, to discuss together, to share ideas.
What is the projected one year budget to keep http://visforvoltage.org operational at it's present rate of growth?
Brooks,
Community Development Specialist
The problem is I haven't been paying attention to the actual growth rate. Up until very recently I thought we were simply going to hold this together until the VV.com site reconstituted. But it appears that site is blown away never to return, and it remains up to us to get things going again on this site.
Yesterday I turned on Google Analytics on this site so that we can collect statistics. It'll be at least 2-3 weeks before we can collect any significant data, especially with the Christmas and other holidays coming up as we can expect a lull in traffic. The only hard statistic I have is page views per day, because of the Adsense advertisement you see to the right of the screen. Google counts the number of page views for me, and this site is already busier than my other sites (on the basis of page views per day).
One thing is we're aiming to run this as a volunteer organization. That leaves the only $$$ cost being any effect on my web site hosting bills from having this site running on my server. As I had pointed out several weeks ago, there's a possibility the traffic will grow to the point to require upgrading to a newer server. On the other hand the Drupal team (whose software we're using for the site) is claiming that Drupal 5 has vastly improved performance. Maybe it'll not be a problem in the long run.
- David Herron, http://www.7gen.com/
- David Herron, http://longtailpipe.com/
We will be away from Mon-Mon December 25 - Jan 1 Christmas/New Year's Official University Holiday.
If you could just provide a ball park figure, that would help.
Brooks,
Community Development Specialist