First, to respond to @GerhardTotschnig The entire list of services offered by the openmod run on donated admin and moderation time, hosting services, and annual domain fees. It might be about time to apply for grant assistance to develop some of these services further. But that would require that someone find a legally incorporated organization through which to apply and then write and agree a funding application with the community at large. Until that point, everything that happens necessarily relies on volunteer labor. I should add that quite a lot of work goes on behind the scenes already, be it developing GDPR privacy policy, screening forum applicants that lack institutional email addresses (we have had several malicious accounts recently, possibly for sock puppets), fixing small annoyances, updating software, running offsite backups, and filing bug reports.
Second, much the same sentiment arose following the 2019 NREL workshop:
Third, to answer @ekatef I don’t think there are any community standards for uploads beyond suitable open licensing. I usually favor Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (SPDX abbreviation CC‑BY‑4.0) because numerical and text data in tables is generally reusable and diagrams can be uploaded to Wikipedia. However, others may prefer Creative Commons Sharealike 4.0 (CC‑BY‑SA‑4.0) and that’s fine too.
For those that are not aware, discourse supports “wiki posts” as described here. The functionality falls well short of a full wiki but it does:
- allow multiple authors
- record the edit history
Fourth, regarding the openmod wiki and more persistent information. That could also be addressed by creating a Core category on this forum, using wiki postings, and suppressing discussion. I am a big fan of wikis but I think they are being eclipsed by platforms that support markdown. I nearly always have to look up the syntax for wiki markup whenever I edit Wikipedia these days. The fact that persistent information and discussion occur on the same platform doesn’t seem particularly detrimental to either role? Do others agree or not?