HyperNews Consortium

Hello to all HyperNews supporters.

I'm writing to ask for your advice about whether I should renew the HyperNews development effort or just let it continue to slide into oblivion.

First a little history. I started HyperNews when there were no others - HyperNews was the first web-based forum system that became possible when CGI was made available. I was just in the right place at the right time. There are now many very good forum system, and I am actually happy to see this state of affairs because one of the big reasons I wanted to create this kind of software was to encourage people to communicate and build communities on the web. I'm not trying to take credit for all the collaboration efforts that followed because I got my inspiration from other online systems before the web, as I am sure many others did. But I hope HyperNews helped to inspire a few efforts that otherwise would have languished. In any case, I have no regrets, regardless whether HyperNews continues now.

At this juncture I have a serious choice to make, and then again, I may not have much choice at all. I've been fully occupied with excellent jobs the past four years since leaving NCSA and moving to the Boston area, but now, like many others in this industry, I am finding myself out of work, and the recruiters that used to call me every other week have been silent. Basically, no one is hiring.

Thus, I will soon have plenty of time on my hands, and rather than spinning my wheels all around town trying to find someone who might employ me, this seems like the perfect opportunity to employ myself, with your help, and in the process, I'll be helping you meet your needs as well.

I have to ask, as you should also, whether it is worthwhile continuing with HyperNews in the face of all the competing systems. There might be many reasons that HyperNews is still viable.

There are several large sites that use HyperNews, including iVillage.com and Advance.net, and new installations are still going up.
It's open source (modulo restriction on proprietary variants; new code will be GPLed).
Threads are more popular now that many people have experienced the benefits.
Two-way email gateway is found in few other systems.
Collaboration systems are very broad, touching on every kind of work and play that people do. There are still market opportunities.
The world needs collaboration systems even more now than before.

It has been quite a while since I last released a version of HyperNews (March 1999), and development has been kind of choppy since then, but there have been many developments, mostly funded by contract work. The most significant changes were moderation support, posted messages may be edited, support for speedycgi and faster generation of message trees, and initial efforts toward use of perl modules and templates. There are still many things that need to be done, and tons of possible features and options to be added. In addition to the innumerable small features and fixes, here are a few of the major areas of work that I have thought of, some that have not been done in any other systems that I know of. I'm sure there are many more that you can think of.

Integration of threading and date sorting. This is a tough one that, if done right, could satisfy the two opposing camps of linear vs tree based discussions.
Real-time chat integrated with the persistent threaded forums. I mean real integration, not just glued together as in other systems. Users may switch a forum to real-time mode to watch messages as they are entered anywhere in the message tree. I designed such a system while I was at W3C, implemented by MIT students.
Integrated voting. A message could be a call for votes, and replies are the votes. Different kinds of voting schemes and ongoing summaries could be supported. Closely related are ratings (a la slashdot), typed messages, and structured dialog constraints.
Adhoc workflow integration. Many collaboration systems support some form of workflow, but usually with too many constraints to be tolerable for real-life situations. Also closely related are attachments, document management, version control, and bug tracking.
Collaborative reference building, like dmoz.org but with many distributed sites so this is potentially more scalable. Integration with messaging, of course.
Indexing and Searching. Virtual forums based on search criteria could make forums self-organizing. Integrate with authoring so that before a message is posted, all related messages are found.
Thoroughly modular architecture, with templates to separate HTML from code. Mason seems to be the best choice here. Also, more database support, especially for membership info and messages metadata.
Generalize users, groups, messages and forums. Each user or group gets one or more forums that work like nestable mail folders.
I'm fairly expert at JavaScript and DHTML and I'd like to provide a front end like the webfx WebBoard (http://webfx.eae.net/) as well as many other dynamic effects, e.g. WYSIWYG message editing.

So there are plenty of interesting things to do, more than enough for one person. How much can I do? I'm confident I will be very productive, if I have the opportunity to work full time on it. The above list is certainly several years worth of work, but I should be able to do all of some items and part of all of them.

To continue development at this time, however, I need to find out from you whether you are willing and able to help me. In addition to possibly helping in many ways with the development effort itself, I need to focus on earning an income, because I can't feed all these fine words to my family.

Here are some funding alternatives.

Consulting to do simple installations and upgrades of HyperNews on your site. I've been doing a fair amount of this, and although it can be tedious, it is also very valuable in terms of finding out first hand what installation problems arise out in the field.
Contract work to improve HyperNews. This is the work that I prefer to do because HyperNews gets better as a result, leading to more interest by others in using it and improving it. It is moderately risky to estimate the time any particular job will take in advance, but this is how most of the development has occurred since I left NCSA.
Group-shared contract work. This is very much like an individual contract, but instead of implementing a feature for just one person, a group of people who all want the same feature would pool their money. The cost per individual is therefore much less, but there is a management overhead. Cosource.com was a site that supported this kind of resource pooling for any projects that people wanted to add. I'm not sure why it didn't work out (the site is now gone, as is sourceExchange.com) but I still think the concept is viable.
Hosting forums at HyperNews.org. I have shied away from doing this because it can become a huge management problem, and I didn't want to take on that responsibility. Moreover, there are a lot of competiting services in this space, and many that offer free forums, supported with advertising. I could do the same, but then it becomes more and more of a portal play, which seems all played out... But I think hypernews.org should continue to host high-level subject forums, such as 'education' and 'government', that reference other forums hosted elsewhere.
Consortium of members. The idea here is that several individuals or organizations (commercial, non-profit, educational, government) would each contribute some moderately small amount of money, anywhere from $100 to $10,000, and they would have a proportional say in how the money is spent and what features are developed. This is similar in some respects to developing and selling a typical commercial product, with development directed by the consumers of the product, but the differences are important to keep in mind. It is more like the group contract idea, but with less overhead and more freedom regarding what is worked on when.
Grants or Sponsorship. This is kind of like the Consortium idea, but with fewer contributors and more of a research or educational motivation. This is basically what I was doing at NCSA, but's a shot in the dark at this time, I think.
Commercial/free version. Advanced versions can be developed and sold in various ways (service or product), which become free some time later. This might be OK, but I don't like to make users live with the old version when there is already a new version that fixes previous bugs, etc.

Of these choices, I'm perfectly willing to continue consulting and contracting, but there is a fairly high overhead in setting up each individual job and following up on it afterwards, and I think people don't want to pay me what I would have to charge to support my current cost of living (at least $100 per hour - the Boston area is ridiculous). The group contract idea could work well to share the costs and reduce the overhead, but now that cosource is gone, how would we manage the process? Perhaps we need to add a few features to HyperNews to support this group contract process!

Thus, the Consortium idea seems the most viable at this time since it has the effect of sharing costs without as much overhead. I would need about 10 members at $10,000 per year, or 100 at $1000 per year, or some combination. A thousand members at $100 per year would also be fine, but I'd need a fairly well automated system to manage communication with that many members.

If there is not quite enough interest yet at this time, I could still live on contracts for a few months hoping the job market turns around. Or whatever level we get, if it is at least a couple months worth, we could start with that and expect that more members will join. (If this doesn't work out, I have a plan B for something new and exciting that will very likely change how the web works. I would start that effort now, but it will take longer for the money to come in, and I can also get there by way of HyperNews, so that is why I want to try the HyperNews Consortium first.)

If there is enough interest, great! I would begin to set up an organization immediately, perhaps modelled after other development consortiums. Initial members would have a huge impact on the form of that organization, of course. I would also set up some forums open to Consortium members for the purpose of discussing the organization and the work to be done. We can take it from there. In fact, being somewhat optimistic, I have created this forum. More will be created as needed.

So, is there enough interest? Of the approximately 300 people on the HyperNews History list, I expect some fraction, maybe 30, will have some interest. There are many other users of HyperNews who are not on the History list - I'll try to contact them. Please ask your coworkers or supervisors or whoever is in charge of the money, and let me know what you find out. Please express your tentative level of interest in becoming Consortium members along with any qualifications or concerns you may have. You may post publically in this forum, or email to me privately. I hope to make some decision about how to proceed within a couple weeks.

Thanks for your support.

Daniel LaLiberte
9 Juniper Ridge Road
Acton, MA  01720
liberte@hypernews.org
978-394-1058 (cell-work)
978-263-4034 (home)

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1 We have to continue... by jason , 2009, Apr 13

2 We should find people that are interested in Collaboration -Democracy , 2001, Oct 10

2 Focusing on particular market segments is a good strategy by Daniel LaLiberte, 2001, Oct 12
Customize Hypernews for "Debian Voting Information" , 2001, Oct 15

3 HN should include postings that use an XML message format. , 2001, Oct 15

4 User of HyperNews in BaBar physics experiment by Douglas Smith, 2002, May 21

1 User of HyperNews in BaBar physics experiment by Daniel LaLiberte, 2002, Jun 04
Re: User of HyperNews in BaBar physics experiment by Douglas Smith, 2002, Jun 05

5 So whats happening with HyperNews consortium? by jason , 2009, Apr 13

1 Many other forum systems are more actively developed by Daniel M LaLiberte, 2004, Feb 29

other forum systems? , 2004, Mar 04

There must be several by Daniel LaLiberte, 2004, Mar 06

1 searching , 2004, Mar 13: ... 1 Message(s)
2 I wish there were others by Russ Hunt, 2004, Aug 28

6 SecondLife by Daniel M LaLiberte, 2005, Jun 12

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