After a tremendous effort by a few of the other admins and volunteers, the new-look lug.org.uk has been launched.
I’m not going to go into massive detail as plenty of other blog posts have been written about this already, and I wasn’t one of the admins doing much work on it. However I am really impressed with what has been achieved and very happy to see the back of the old site and server it was on.
It will be interesting to see what we can come up with in terms of managed services for our users in future. I would like eventually for all new accounts by default to be given only restricted access and a prearranged list of customisable applications, instead of the current full shell account and free use of PHP/CGI that they have had previously. Whether we should ever (again) offer anything more is something I am not convinced about.
The vast majority of accounts do not require anything but the most simple web hosting, and supporting the legacy environment would be a challenge for even a commercial hosting company. I think that providing complex custom hosting for free is not our remit and groups desiring that should be looking for a commercial hosting provider. It’s also my opinion that providing hosting services should always remain a relatively minor part of what we do — okay, mailing lists are essential but most LUGs can scrape together some web hosting for themselves if they need to. What we are primarily there for I believe is to help with cross-LUG communication and publicity, simply keeping track of which LUGs exist and how to find them and so on. The new site should help us do that but there is always room for improvement.
Another issue we’ve done a lot of talking about but not managed to make much progress on is the issue of incorporation. To date, lug.org.uk has been run by individuals, services have been donated and we’ve never really accepted monetary donations. In the last couple of years we’ve faced having to buy decent hardware, because no company was interested in donating something suitable, and begging for it was time-consuming and soul-destroying. We also now have a recurring cost for hosting which is basically being paid for by a couple of us as individuals. It would be nicer in some respects if we could formally incorporate lug.org.uk as a non-profit society / club / charity / whatever, so that it could have its own bank account and pay its suppliers.
We’ve made a couple of stabs at the charter that would be required for this — Hugo in particular has spent a lot of time on it — yet we’ve never managed to come to an agreement amongst the active admins over responsibilities and burdens it would place on us. I hope we can resolve this one day soon. In the meantime we should probably just add some sort of donations page.
A number of the lug.org.uk admins including myself will be at FOSDEM for the next few days. If you have any ideas for lug.org.uk or just want a chat please do seek us out! We’ll be wearing lug.org.uk t-shirts but if you’re having no luck finding us then the phone number in my contact details will work.