First, thank you for taking a stab at themes. I hope all is going well for you and everone else in that area. Please let us know when you have something.
Before anyone goes and buys things there are probably FEC rules. I think I saw something come over the list saying there was a $250 personal max, but don't quote me on that. Because of our unclear legal status we should be careful in that area. For now I think having each site find its own hosting is best. If a site is willing and has the resources we can put other area sites on their server. Our legal status should clear up soon so we can feel free to make definitive decisions on this. Having said that we should find places which will cooperate with us and individual sites for hosting. If we have a list of these ready we can get individual sites up quicker. I will start a page on the wiki under OpenDecisons for us to catalog these potential hosting providers and discuss issues. We will need a place to put our server which will house MetaDean. It looks like the current home of americansfordean.com isn't quite up to it. I should note that I have never run a high traffic website or bought hosting so I am not an expert on this issue. I can make a rough estimate for bandwidth or pocessor use, but I don't think any of us quite know how big this will get. As for domain names, I think that also is being limited by our ambiguous status. As far as I can tell we only really need one or two for top level stuff, which we have. Domains for individual sites can still go through fordean.net or we can get more for them. On the software side we are not quite ready, there is still much to do. On the legal side we still need to define ourselves. When these are ready I expect we will do what we can with our current servers. At some point we will probably have to move over to some other hosting provider or find something for some individual sites. Until then I think we need to work on the things at hand and be ready for rolling out these services quickly. This is ambitious project we need to take one step at a time while looking ahead and, most importantly, we need to keep moving. -Neil (sorry for the long posts, please consider responding off list if appropriate) -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] aim: ndrumm3 http://www.ews.uiuc.edu/~ndrumm
