I think one of the huge disappointments of the collapse of wildlandfire.com was the instant evaporation of an enormous amount of insight, intel, history, and stories, in other words, a decade of OUR work. Can the owners of this new site tell us users ways in which you can insure this won’t happen again if your business changes or something else beyond the control of the users comes up? Can we as a community figure out a reliable way to store public, offsite backups of the data from this site? Or have some sort of export method that distributes the data. Can the data be put under some sort of Creative Commons licensing?
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Hey PyroGeography.
I have a lot to say on this topic and not a lot of time at the moment so here are the highlights.
I feel the same way that you do about this topic and am dedicated to ensuring it doesn’t happen again. I actually made a cash offer to the old owners for the wildlandfire.com archives but they were unreasonable and unwilling to negotiate. It’s a shame.
The commitment to protecting the community contributions on WildfireIntel are baked into the DNA of this group. Before we launched the site, we created a Colorado based non-profit to manage the IP and set the mission and values. There is no commercial aspect to the mission (the downfall of wildlandfire.com IMHO). We held our first open Board meeting in June and have the next scheduled for Sept. The Board is made up of volunteers and moderators.
The Non-profit (the Wildland Fire Community Inc.) has committed to posting the code and the database to the public domain - likely to github. We haven’t done so yet as it will take some effort to cleanse the data of personally identifiable data (email passwords, IP addresses, etc.) To be honest, we haven’t yet had time but I would expect that we do this at least once a year.
Lastly, we would welcome your assistance to help the community grow, thrive and live on in posterity. If you have some expertise and time to help build the guidelines for appropriate public archiving, let’s talk some more.
- Best,
7Hills
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I found this as well, as there were a couple of us out here in CA that spoke with them, and were willing to pay a healthy sum for the data. We had equipment and a data center with a fat pipe all lined up ready to go, but the new owners of the intellectual property weren’t willing to deal. It makes me wonder if that data just disappeared, or if it’s sitting on a decommissioned server on a shelf somewhere.
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It may be worth revisiting this issue with them again. Maybe once things calm down around here, we can discuss a strategy for contacting the bankruptcy administrators.
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It would be great to be able to resurrect the archive from the old website. I’m sure we could raise cash thru Gofundme or something like that if needed.
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