Hey nice userops people,
I saw Sandstorm get a mention earlier, and so I wanted to send a quick note about what Sandstorm is and how it relates to empowering users to be the ones controlling their own servers.
In a sentence: Sandstorm is like Google Apps For Your Domain, but it's free software, and you can run it on your own server.
If you have 120 seconds when you read this, you really must try the demo. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is:
* Click "Try the Demo"
* Hooray, it's like you've installed Sandstorm on your own machine. Now:
* Install Etherpad, and
* Make a new Etherpad document.
* Should take you 120 seconds, at most. Please reply saying what you think!
A bit about motivation: I'm working on this project, as part of a 5-person company, because I think that installing software in a server can be as easy as installing "apps" on a mobile phone. No config files; no "provisioning of resources". If that sounds extreme, consider this: the success of GNU/Linux distributions like Debian meant that users don't have to think about CFLAGS to install a free software program.
Sandstorm's goal is to make things easy and also make it safe. The last thing I want is to enable people to mass-install web apps with poor security so we "help people self-host" but that actually causes massive data breaches among the people I'm trying to help. In that sense, I was impressed by Chris Webber's "user ops" terminology.
I'll try to say more about Sandstorm on Monday or so, in a different thread. For now, I'm hoping people would be willing to try the demo and ask questions in this thread.
-- Asheesh.
P.S. I'm also on freenode's #userops and #sandstorm, as paulproteus; feel free to ping me there.