Re: governance model w3id

On Tue, Mar 5, 2019 at 7:55 AM Alina Saenko <alina@packed.be> wrote:

> ...
>
The model of W3id has a lot of influence on our project. I have a couple of
> questions about your governance model that I didn't find the answers to at
> your website. I was hoping you could find some time to give me more
> information in these topics:
>
- How do you generate the financial means to manage the service? Do the six
> organizations each make a yearly contribution? In money or in time and are
> the shares the same?
>

w3id.org is currently an inexpensive service to run since basically it's
just doing simple URL redirects.  It's roughly under USD $20/mo hosting +
yearly domain cost.  Digital Bazaar has just been covering that cost.  If
anyone wants to help pay that, we welcome the support, but it's currently
not enough to worry about.

The time has mostly been me and another volunteer handling update
requests.  I also do server maintenance and monitoring as needed.  There
are others with access but there hasn't been enough work to worry about
spreading it out.

If high traffic use cases or sudden popularity appears, that could all
change, but we took the path of waiting to see how the service is used
before spending time and money on complex infrastructure.  In hindsight, we
chose wisely.



> - How do you keep and give the overview of the spending of financial means
> to the partners? Is there an organization that was created specifically to
> overlook these things?
>

I'm not sure if anyone has ever asked for financial details.  It it gets to
be a burden, we'll ask for support.



> - How much say do each of the partners have in the decision making about
> the service?
>

We welcome decision making input from partners or anyone else.  There
haven't been that many decisions to make though.  The only ones are related
to day-to-day adding and updating of redirect rules.  We do updates via
GitHub PRs so it's all public.  There are only a few times we've had to ask
people to change their requests due to using a name that could cause
confusion (like "id" or similar).  Just trusting the judgement of those who
can merge PRs has been good enough so far.


- How would you formulate the return of investment for the engaged parties?
> Why do the six organizations find it is important to participate in keeping
> this service alive for themselves and everyone else and invest their own
> time and money in it?
>
>
As you can probably tell from above, this hasn't been a resource intensive
endeavor so far.  From that view the return on investment has been high for
all. ;-)

I hope these responses help.  Unclear if they apply in your situation.  For
any similar project I would suggest starting small and simple and grow as
needed.

-dave