Hosting Terms
Context, pertinence and relevance
This documentation has suggestions from research and experiences from specific social contexts.
They are not, on any level, universal suggestions or impositions about specific ways to act and behave.
They're not models that must be followed, but models that can be adopted, adapted or even criticized and improved, as long as they can be useful, helpful and make sense.
Incomplete document
The documentation that follows is in an initial stage, very incomplete and may not make sense outside it's original context.
Additional work is still needed to bring it to a minimally useful and comprehensible state.
Hi :)
Agreement on Hosting
We discussed and we agree to offer hosting as you requested. Now, in order for we to effectivelly maintain this hosting, we need to:
- State what is our commitment in relation to this hosting.
- That you and/or your group agree with the present term of agreement and with our Hosting Policy.
These are mutual commitment agreements, where we explain what is our commitment with the hosting and that the hosted part needs to agree so we can keep such relation.
In case you agree with the terms of this letter and accept our Hosting Policy, just reply saying so and the hosting will start as soon as possible. :)
Our commitment
We commit ourselves to keep the hosting working. The hosting maintenance happens through volunteer and responsible work.
The used infra-structure is stable, but subject to eventual power and network outages or even more sensitive problems.
Then, sometimes hosting can go offline. We will always be allert and we care for security and integrity of the hosted data. But, for a lot of reasons, we cannot garantee the total availability or even the eternity of such data.
We commit ourselves as much as possible to keep security copies of the data we host. But we ask for you to also arrange, as much as possible, backup copies of your data.
Our group is composed by people that do a lot of tasks. The most important and sensitive tasks, such as hosting, are dependent to other taks and each one is associated to a workgroup of responsible persons.
It may happen that someone leaves a workgroup and eventually some tasks will lack commited people to get them accomplished. It's on this sense that we garantee hosting: according to the available workforce at our group. It's possible that, in the future, something happens and we stop hosting in a given platform. But, if we do so, we garantee that it won't happen from night to day and we'll give enough time for you and your project to migrate the data somewhere else.
We also have the commitment to inform, when you ask, our procedures according to our accounting policy. Such procedures vary from privacy and security policies to choices of platforms and our group's situation.
As our procedures can change with time, we recommend you to ask for procedures descriptions when you feel necessary.
We have our limitations but we'll keep things working as much as we can. :)
Your commitment
We hope that you and/or your project use the offered resource with wisdom. Don't ask for websites and tools if you will abandon them. If you install your own programs, please have the responsibility to keep it up-to-date as security holes at your place can compromise other hosted projects.
Please don't forget that the maintenance of multiple projects needs a lot of work and is difficult to keep secure. Then we ask for everyone's collaboration. We would be very pleased if you informed us about your plans to install tools in your space. :)
Sharing interfaces
A possible space for interactions among projects is the Neighborhood Mailing List[1] (subscription just for sufficiently secure mail accounts, get in touch for more information). When we host groups and individuals, we hope that they will also be responsible in what comes to taking care of such spaces.
Our neighborhood is also a place for articulations, where all groups and individuals sharing the same infra-structure can communicate between themselves.
If the subjects we research are inspiring for you too, we invite you to participate in such discussions. To avoid centralization, we propose you to collectivelly discuss with your group and publish the conclusions you get. For us it is fundamental to try to build a metodology that makes possible the dissemination of such discussions.
[1] $neighborhood_mailing_list_address
In solidarity, $grupo Collective