Hey, I'm clampe! I'm indicted above, so might as well respond to the "open letter".
First, let me say, I'm writing this without consultation with Dann, Jack, nate or anyone else. We do not have weekly meetings, or late night chat sessions, or even clumsy groping in the back of my 1978 Mercury Cougar. I see kurt pretty often, nate when I can, and Dann and Jack deserve nothing but respect for putting up with the lot of us. The only power I have is that I am busting ass to keep the bandwidth flowing to the site, and am trying to find more money for research and development. I do not have a stake in Blockstackers, and no financial stake in this site at all.
OK, let's reflect on the newsletter which is being treated a little like Mein Kampf. Let's start at the beginning, with a small and recent history. The University of Michigan was no longer willing to host E2, since we'd always had a somewhat shaky relationship with them. We were hosted by UM because both Kurt and I were grad students there, and dizzy was a sysadmin working in kurt's department. Once both kurt and I graduated, it became hard for UM to justify providing free bandwidth to this crazy little site.
So Kurt and I hustled at our new department, at Michigan State University. We talked to our boss. We talked to his boss. We talked to the CIO of the university, and to a group of lawyers who almost made me murderous. E2 is a hard sell. How I nearly killed myself masturbating doesn't look great to the Board of Regents, especially when it's unclear what the University gets out of the deal. Luckily, our dean is a decent guy, and worked out a deal where some portion of ad sales would got to MSU as a donation, and MSU would serve E2s pages.
So we had bandwidth, and we had a little money from the often contentitious Donation Box, plus some straight out hardware donations from a kick ass noder who hasn't given permission to share their name. We threw some hardware on top of our new pimp bandwidth, and the biggest issue with E2, namely slow pageloads, started to get better.
At this point the decision was to let things go on as normal, or try to increase traffic to the site. It doesn't take a deep look at the numbers to see E2 is in trouble. Old noders leave for a variety of reasons, but it's hard to attract new users. E2 is unfriendly to new noders. No, really. If a person has the balls to overcome the confusion of the interface and the insular language, and write a new piece of content, the overwhelming odds are that people will hate on it until a Content Editor deletes it. Be honest. If you came to E2 today, would you put up with that? It's not that we need to grow for growth's sake, but rather we want to make sure there are enough users to move forward in the future. It would be nice to, at the very least, to equal out the number of noders leaving and the number of noders joining.
So some of the desire to change stems from a desire to reflect changes in the environment of sites like this. E2 started when things were pretty different. Before Livejournal. Before Wikipedia. What types of things would help update E2 to make it more competitive in a world where there were a lot more options than when it started?
Well, the interface is pretty ghetto, so we threw open a contest to see if the noders could do better. We got some nice designs, though my sense is we're still looking for somethng really evocative for Guest User, who represents 90% of our pageloads. I think multimedia was another piece of low hanging fruit. Having read (I think) every criticism of the development plan, I think video is a bad idea. I think photos could still work, with the same quality assessments we use with writing in nodes. We were hoping to encourage more types of participation, which is where the idea of discussion pages came in. Right now every WU is a serious commitment in time and energy. Is there a way to lighten that up for people still experimenting with the site? Is the only way to particpate on E2 to devote a ton of time to it? We thought being able to attach a note to a node might allow that. Or maybe tagging. The process issues with any of those design changes would be huge, and we're not forgetting that even if we haven't mapped it out completely. We've also seen some great ideas we didn't have in the development letter. Better chat features. Better search features. Moving the vote button to the bottom of the write up. Big boobed strippers serving everyone delicious coffee drinks.
Which brings us to the rub. There are no paid engineers on E2. There's not paid anybody on E2. Consequently changes have to happen when they can. Our estimate of mid-October turned out to be too ambitious. Partially this is because we are hoping to figure out a scheme of paying the E2 developers to code new features. We have gone more slowly on that than Dann at least hoped, in part because we want to make sure no one gets screwed in the process, and in part because we're split into a million different directions, like all of you.
I think the tone of the development newsletter implied that these were the changes that were coming, no feedback needed thank you, and this was all decided without you. This is not what was meant. New features will need to be introduced slowly, and taken away if they don't work. We'll likely start by offering a "bounty" to pay for the ability to post pictures. We'll start there and see how it goes. I've been busting my ass to write grants to get more money for E2, but academic grants have a 1/10 success rate. Hopefully more money will help, but that's not clear. Dann and Jack have both done incredible work in their domains, and are waiting on others to get crap done to start putting new features in place. We'll get there. We're looking for talented coders we can pay to do this work, but we don't have a ton of money, and the codebase is a little crazy. I doubt I can find an undergrad who can just step in and get it done.
Or... we can go as have been and the last noder left can shut off the lights. I don't know what the future holds, though everyone associated with the "administration" of the site is willing to listen to feedback. Instead of deleting content should everything be considered "in progress" until it receives a certain amount of upvotes and then goes into the official database? Should we rethink levels given changes in content standards? What other ways can we help people transition into participation? (not that I want everyone who comes to E2 to be a participant). There are a thousand similar questions most of you have already raised.
There are no intentional secrets, no cabals in place. My name is Clifford Arthur Cochise Lampe. My email is lampecli@msu.edu, as it says in my homenode. My phone number is 734-383-5242, though I live in the eastern time zone so take that into account when you call. I'm an assistant professor at Michigan State University. My wife's name is Mary Beth, I'm a Democrat, and originally from Holland, MI. I work about 74 hours a week, but I'm willing to answer any question you have and promise a reply. I may not know the answer, but I'll tell you if I don't. If you have code, let me know. If you have good ideas on how to improve E2, let me know. If you want to lob accusations, that's fine too. My name is Clifford Arthur Cochise Lampe.