"Nepotism" — the experience of creating a non-profit project (three years old)
A few weeks ago the project "Nepotism" was three years old that, in my opinion, is quite serious "age." Non-profit project that operates solely on the enthusiasm and which do not help financially nor investors, nor the like-minded, relatively easy to live longer than a year, so it's safe to say at least a single fact: the project is definitely in demand.
This publication is not only an attempt to PR (for the sake of cleanliness of experiment, all previous publications and more two-year-old moved to the drafts), but an attempt to share with the participants Habra experience in the development and support of non-profit project to publish typical and atypical mistakes, to talk about how we cope with them and how do not.
Due to the fact that the size of the text exceeds the reasonable limits, the publication will be divided at least into two parts: in the first part I will talk about how the project was created as evolved, as developed; in the second part, if my karma drops to negative values, I'll tell you about mistakes, breakup, Falah, omissions, bouts of impotence, and how we heroically overcome, but something overcame us, and I will try to respond centrally to criticism and questions available in the comments to the first publication.
In addition, due to the fact that many abrowser extremely negative attitude to the publications in the respective hubs, all active hyperlinks are rendered in the final part of the article and their number does not exceed a reasonable amount.
So, shall we start?
About the project: General information
"Nepotism" – a community of different people who provide mutual legal assistance, share experiences and try to prove that you can protect your rights as a laws can work the way they should.
In the "Nepotism" lies several principles, United by a simple idea: "if someone something knows how to do well and if someone has the time to do it for free — why these people are not to unite?".
In our case, we are talking about legal aid, which in our wonderful country are inaccessible due to the senseless and merciless ratio of price and quality: the cost of lawyer varies from "expensive" to "prohibitively expensive" and quality remains uncertain value.
In contrast to the "free legal advice" project participants do not require from visitors money for the full version answer: there is no reciprocal commercial obligations do not bind any of those who advises or those who advise.
In practice it turns out like this: a visitor asks the visitor gets the answer – the visitor obtains practical experience in solving problems and a basic minimum of theoretical knowledge what to do next, only his choice.
In most cases, the visitor received an answer to the question just goes away – until next time or forever. It happens all the time.
In a minority of cases work our plan – the visitor understands that protecting your rights is not so difficult, moreover, now he has the experience and knowledge that can be passed to someone else, and, as a rule, this occurs on the project site.
Now, when someone comes to the site and specifies the same or a similar question, answer it not only professional lawyers, but also those who have already managed to solve something similar on your own or with our help.
Such is the kind of relay of legal knowledge without mutual obligations.
the development of the project: technical details
So first it was a normal single user blog, running on Wordpress. Formally, from that moment, is counting the time of creation of the project, in fact, it's probably not quite true – at that time the whole project was just my cosy blog that posts universal content not too often alternated posts content law.
Technically, Wordpress was not so bad: serious community, open source and a large variety of supplements at first glance was decisive advantages, but they are easily covered by just two nedostatkami – infernal slowness and remarkable voracity.
At the time the project was hosted at SpaceWeb (I wasn't confident in his abilities, and therefore chose the cheapest suitable tariff, observing the rule of "cheap and nasty is better than expensive and well").
The approach paid off: the strokes of the rake head were not in vain. Was done moving for a better fare at the same time changed CMS for one that more suits my requirements: also open source, easy to setup and larger number of purely social "features" (ratings, karma, distribution — in short, "your own Habr, poker and virgins").
At the time I liked Cogear CMS, and it is on this CMS project "Nepotism" he worked most of his life.
Nothing bad about Cogear can not say, but I can say only good things: at the moment the functionality of the system I was more than satisfied, economical attitude to RAM me happy, and resistance to bursts of traffic astounded me.
All pleased, even Skalaksi on the time seemed not too bad, but Cogear stopped me to arrange community has been actively working on a second version, the first version of the CMS in fact be supported longer, and at that point I had needed more advanced social features, which I could offer only LiveStreet.
In the practical operation LiveStreet has established itself very well and relatively quickly I got used to the logic of the system, was able to learn how to adjust the code and modify the template to suit your needs.
Particularly pleased with a serious number of plugins: if necessary, the functionality of the site expanded almost simultaneously with user queries, resulting in a positive impact on the reputation of the project.
By the way, the result of perturbations the site is running on Debian 6 + nginx + php-fpm. The increase compared to Ubuntu + Apache significant.
Judge for yourself by the results of testing LoadImpact (the first chart — Debian / nginx / php-fpm / php-apc / memcache / LiveStreet, second schedule — Ubuntu / Apache + mod_php / MySQL / eaccelerator / memcache / Cogear). In both cases, caching was enabled, hosting (at the time) — Skalaksi.
By the way, here relevant testing; everything seems to be working not so bad?
Now the site of the project feels on cloud machine in Selectable, as a result of the escape of the cost of hosting has fallen in two times without any negative effects.
A similar configuration in Skalaksi have cost me about 700 rubles. Pretty good, moving happy.
the development of the project: non-technical details
As shown, the development community, the important point is not only the content but also the form. It is difficult to say what is primary (an argument derived from the category of "what came first, the chicken or the egg"), but each time with the development of the website had very much, even beyond recognition, change and more, each time causing a significant amount of hate.
When the website was a simple single-user blog, first time no problems there: I wrote regarding relevant legal article, there were comments, I answered them and everyone was happy.
The exit lay on the surface: it was necessary to build a small social network.
Again at first everything was great: the article is theoretical in nature were combined on the basis of uniformity in the relevant collective blogs. While at the mercy of the majority was given to the collective blog with the telling title "Need help!", that at the time solved all the problems.
At the time, we are faced with the fact that the content of the website has degraded to the state "legal assistance free of charge to download online for free without registration free": none of what mutual aid it is not passed, people came, asked a question, received a response from the active participants of the website (at the time — on the strength of three men, who in the sweat of trying to do something) and with a clear conscience left.
I was ready to give up, but suddenly something happened and the project work as planned – suddenly there has been a qualitative leap, and now the active audience of the site increased by about ten times, earned in practice a system of mutual support, and typical questions that have been asked eleven times, had disappeared, replaced by really serious problems.
In the end we came to what is now the total number of users exceeded two thousand people, of whom about a hundred active members who find time to participate in discussions, constructive assistance and exchange of experience.
Attendance is gradually increasing, the quality of the advice seems to be not falling but lately the transition from the service "questions and answers" to the community priorities aimed at exchange of practical experience, has gone leaps and bounds.
Everything seems to be fine. In practice, it is not so, and this (if karma will not fall below minimum 20 units) I will write the next article.
Only the link to the website
Link.
P. S. in the presence of information about errors please write in private messages. Thank you.
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