I can provide some context for the decision to host this Forum on the servers of the company leading the development of Discourse. We are happy to discuss possible next steps, but it is useful to be aware of this context.
- The Wikimedia Space prototype was announced as a Discourse instance hosted on the Wikimedia Cloud VPS and technically maintained by a mix of volunteering Foundation staff members who had enough skills for that task (at a prototype level). This was ok for announcing a prototype but not enough as a long-term solution.
- We wanted to have a committed plan for a migration to Wikimedia production servers and maintenance by the Wikimedia Site Reliability Engineering team. We couldn’t get this commitment on time, and Wikimedia Space was closed.
- Taking these lessons learned, we looked at a different alternative. https://wikimediafoundation.org/ and https://diff.wikimedia.org/ are hosted in the servers of the company leading the development of Wordpress. This was an interesting precedent, also relevant because Diff is a spin-off of Wikimedia Space. We checked the possibility to host this Forum in the Discourse devs servers, and the check passed the security and legal reviews.
- The currently contracted hosting includes the technical maintenance of the Forum. This includes upgrades and security fixes, also quick answers to support questions. Our bug reports and feature requests count a bit more, just like the ones put forward by other paying customers count a bit more. The price is affordable and probably cheaper than if we would do maintenance in-house. All in all, this looked like the best option for a start, and we got the budget to cover this service until the end of June 2023.
And with this, we announced the Movement Strategy Forum community review with a fully-functional forum.