User:Jscott

This is the original free-wheeling rant I did in the Discord to work out how this would potentially work:

For my metaphor to make sense, I will say that during the production of my documentary GET LAMP, I learned about the interesting relationship between the Mammoth Cave Park (largest cave system in the world) and the Cave Research Foundation:

"In 1957, the Cave Research Foundation was registered as a non-profit corporation under the laws of the state of Kentucky. Its goals were to promote exploration and documentation of caves and karst areas, to initiate and support cave and karst research, to aid in cave conservation and protection, and to assist with the interpretation of caves and karst to the public."

Now, I got to visit the current incarnation of the CRF, a building on the Mammoth Cave Park property. If you want to go into the caves, you go through CRF. They have the keys that let you into the caves (the keys and grate in ADVENTURE are real, I've touched them). They send parties out after you if you don't get back in time. They also extend grants, map the caves, track scientific research, and so on. That generalized sense of a place, a thing being so big and full of potential and maybe impossible to truly grasp the full amount of, seems appropriate to the Archive. So I visualize an organization that is wholly separate from the Internet Archive (I'll just use IA, which is what employees call it), that involves itself in a bunch of goals that are nobly helpful for IA but which couldn't possibly fall under its budget.

Some possible examples:

• Continued work documenting as much as possible, or providing documentation
• Helping with ingestion and consolidation of materials
• Helping on-site with things like de-duping, or occasional major sorts of media
• Organizing outreach, or even events, using the IA building itself, or other spaces
• Organizing possible monthly meet-ups, online and off None of this should be a shocker, and I think it's an interesting set of circumstances it hasn't happened like this before. What brought this up for discussion was that we just set up that mastodon server. (mastodon.archive.org if you didn't know), and as thousands are following our accounts, I saw more than a little confusion about the idea that people would not be able to sign up for it, that it was JUST for Internet Archive employees and role accounts, i.e. an approved federation node that was meant to be inherently self-verifying. But a non-zero number of people asked why couldn't they just sign up, enough that I was asked internally at IA, why couldn't we just let people sign up and I said it was hours of work just to keep the thing up and running and moderated as is, having thousands of people on such a server would be a nightmare, and make one or more employees take on even more than they should. But the fundamental idea was true: There should be a place that Friends of the Archive could gather. But I had already been thinking of doing something like this for years - along two main channels of thought. First, that there were functions that really should be under non-profits and not just controlled by the big tech firms, even though they were, to some level, being generous offering free image storage, dns, mirroring, and so on, it would always serve over time as a point of corruption. I know some of them have deep internal walls to prevent complete corruptions, but I honestly think it's a matter of time. But having a non-profit communcations setup, time server and so on, really needs a firm organization behind it. Second, the Internet Archive has volunteer functions that shouldn't be left to the whim or varying resources of the Archive. What if, for some reason, they need to stop having in-person events? Or if employees have to be put into a different role that takes them away from running the free NTP server someone's been running for all this time? I just feel an independent group will be the way to go to ensure something runs smoothly. And, as I really am the Angel of Death about these things, it also allows a backup organization to understand the goals of IA should it be incapacitated in some way. ("Incapacitated" could mean 100 things, I'm not being alarmist.)