Here's the master plan for the next few weeks. CODING PROJECTS/STATUS http://dreamwidth.cometheapocalypse.com/notes/Dreamwidth.org:_Pre-Launch
DOCUMENTATION We don't currently have someone running point on things like FAQs, etc. I know Denise had some people send emails about wanting to do it, so let's refresh that. If you still want to take point on documentation/FAQs, please let us know, so we can get that ball rolling. The basic idea is that we need someone who is going to dive in and take point on documentation. When we launch (to beta, whatever) we're going to need someone in there pretty quickly setting up scaffolding for this. There is also a lot of work to do with writing things for various pages we will be creating, i.e., explaining invite codes, payment system, etc. Big task, important task. Help us out! TESTING TESTING TESTING All of the above will need heavy testing. We are going to be calling out on the mailing list asking for people to sign up to beta and then to get in and start poking things on the staging server. Please stay tuned as this is going to come up pretty fast. ADMINISTRATION * Denise will be opening a bank account in DW's name this week, I believe. (Hopefully, anyway; we need it soon!) * I have started coordinating with SliceHost who will be our beta hosting provider, and probably early launch. * Project coordination takes time away from coding, but that's life. :-) LAUNCH PLAN We're going to beta initially, but ideally very shortly. The point of having a beta is really just to do some QA/testing of functionality without feeling bad if things don't quite work right. It will also help us to keep the number of users really low (<100) so we can iterate very quickly without causing pain for lots of people. But the beta will be short. A few weeks at the most, hopefully shorter. Once we're satisfied that things are functional and that we don't have any major bugs, we'll "launch." This does not mean you will be able to immediately create your account! We have invite codes for a reason. Demand is going to far outpace supply initially: Denise and I don't have the cash (especially since Janine is now jobless) to spend $10k+ on setting up enough servers to let *everybody* in on day 1. What's going to happen is that we're going to decide on a number of accounts we believe we can support and then give out that many codes. Priority to users who are willing to pay, and probably everything else is first-come-first-served (except those who are volunteering who will of course be on the site from the beginning). The invite codes are a method of controlling growth in a predictable manner. (Which translates to: we need to balance people paying with buying servers. We can't buy servers until people pay, but people can't pay until we have room for them. Catch-22 that requires some careful balancing.) At the same time we need to balance so as to let enough people in (i.e., if we don't have enough, we don't get network effect, and hinder overall growth - possibly killing it). So we'll err on the side of 'get lots of people, and deal with the site being a little slow'. SYNOPSIS Things are moving. Things are moving quickly. SUP has made it very clear that they don't care about the health of the LiveJournal community. This is our chance to do something about that. I really hope you're with us on what promises to be an exciting ride. :) -- Mark Smith / xb95 [email protected] _______________________________________________ dw-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.dwscoalition.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dw-discuss
