[Q] Who owns/runs this website?

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:wave: I’ve got a couple of questions RE the forums website and how it operates. Can you please elaborate a bit on the answers to my rather blunt questions?

(1) Is this a community-driven community-owned website? Do the moderators represent the agenda of any particular company?

(2) In some places the word we is used but I’m not sure I understand whom does it refer to. For example the FAQ → Terms of Service section reads

Yes, legalese is boring, but we must protect ourselves – and by extension, you and your data – against unfriendly folks.

Can you clarify who is “we” in that sentence?

Thanks :pray:

PS: Apologies if this is the not right category for my inquiry. It’s always awkward for me when I’ve just joined a new community to figure out where things should go :sweat_smile:

PPS: I just :heart: that there is the Solarized Light theme available in the user preferences :raised_hands:

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Hi @bahmanm! Always happy to answer such a well-stated question, and the category is perfect, this is intended for all questions about the forum itself. Indeed, helping to signpost community folks to the right resources is part of the purpose - we have quite a lot of other places, and we frequently hear that people don’t know where to start. Now we can send them here :slight_smile:

To your points then!

We need to disentangle “who pays for this” vs “who drives it”, I think (although I’ll accept that they are always adjacent to one-another). The bill for the site is paid for by Red Hat - the cost is not trivial, and as Ansible’s primary sponsor it made sense to ask Red Hat to cover it.

It is also true that today the moderators are all Red Hat employees (specifically, the members of the Red Hat Ansible Community Team). However, as the team name implies, our purpose is to look after and grow the community, so the “agenda” here is very much the community agenda. Indeed, this forum exists because I took a long hard look at a lot of things, and then wrote two lengthy blog posts about why we needed this, and then got the community to vote on it first. Our team’s agenda is Ansible-first.

In additional, while the moderators today are all Red Hat employees, that is simply a consequence of getting this thing off the ground with Red Hat paying for it. It is absolutely our intention to build a set of moderators from the wider community, once this has had time to settle in.

That is fair - I think that may have been written before the privacy policy, which is better at staying in the third person. “We” here refers to the people running this site, which right now is the Ansible Community Team, on behalf of the Ansible Community (as discussed above).

I hope that helps, let me know if I can clarify more!

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Thanks for getting back to me.

That is reasonable and was my thought as well :+1:

That makes sense to me and I appreciate Red Hat making this happen :pray:

:brain: My only thought is does it make sense to try to find more sponsors w/ the twofold aim of 1) reduce the :moneybag: burden on Red Hat and 2) make sure this valuable initiative stays healthy and strong in case Red Hat or any other single sponsor decides to reduce their spendings.

:musical_note: to my ears! Very much looking forward to seeing that happen :v:

I think I’ve got the answers I was looking for…for now :sweat_smile: Thanks.

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Glad to hear it! Accepting money isn’t the easiest thing to make happen, but you’re not wrong that it would be a good idea in principle. I’ll put it on my backlog to figure out how, and you can all go find me the sponsors :laughing:

One good thing about using an open-source tool like Discourse is that we (the community) own the archive. Today we’d be just as stuck if Google decides to axe Groups - but we can always export our backups from here and hydrate a self-hosted instance (or set up on another provider) if this one needs to go away.

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