Apologies in advance for a disorganised post.
So something a bit more positive. If the site merges (and we all know I am not keen on that), but if it merges Daniel owns the domain name. Frankly, I think we should own the forum database. We are the ones that put all the content in there in the first place. All those millions of posts were written by the society, and should belong to the society.
Can you clarify what you mean by "own the database"?
If you mean
literally own the database, then I don't really agree that this is an option, or that it will ever be. There's a plethora of concerns, security and otherwise, associated with this idea - Lord Dave has done a great job explaining some of the most important ones.
If you mean ownership of the content of posts from a copyright perspective (as later indicated by your "I'm not suggesting the society do anything with the database at all" post), that's not only legally complex (and in some countries outright invalid), but also horribly restrictive. It also brings us no legitimate benefit whatsoever, as far as the mission statement of the FES
1 goes.
The only potential use I can see for this is malicious: If someone posted a piece of their own creative content and then profited from a derivative thereof, you'd have a vague case for demanding royalties. We have always been opposed to policing people's posts beyond necessity.
Of course, comments are welcome, and if the majority decide that that's what they want to do, then that's what we will take to Daniel, but as far as I'm concerned, the posts should belong to the posters (as they do by default under most countries' copyright, so this requires no action on anyone's part) and not to an organisation -
that is what I see as the community owning its content. Anything else would be taking the control
away from the community.
I still don't see any valid reason why Daniel would make a bad Queen of England.
I feel that this isn't representative of the agreement we've come up with in this thread. By what we agreed upon, Daniel wouldn't really be the Queen of England - rather, he would be deputised when absent. See below for my response to markjo.
I'm know that Parsifal and PizzaPlanet have been discussing the technical aspects of the merger with Daniel, but I have seen little discussion of the leadership of the merged society. Perhaps the ZC should be discussing any potential leadership changes with Daniel and the other FES members before they get too far into the new constitution.
We did discuss it to some extent in this very thread. Here's my understanding of things, please correct me if anyone feels I misunderstood or misrepresented: Parsifal opened this thread by saying: "To summarise, please consider whether you would like to see a reunion
where Daniel heads the Society and myself and pizaaplanet head the online community (forum and wiki).
If no, but you would be open to a reunion under different broad terms, please say so. [...]" There was some contention regarding Daniel's leadership, of which I think the key turning point was Tom Bishop's
proposal and my
counter-proposal based on Tom's concerns. In the end, my suggestion was met with overwhelming support, so unless a new popular suggestion arises or any major difficulties come up, we'll be going with that.
I could be wrong, but I'm thinking that with Parsifal and PP on the job, the process should take significantly less than 2 years. My WAG (wild ass guess) would be closer to 2-3 months.
That sounds like a decent guess, but I wouldn't want to put a timeline on it just yet.
1 - I'm going with Daniel's FES here, since ours doesn't really have a mission statement per se.