If you do write more about this I’d encourage you to take on a clearly imperfect but perhaps helpful comparison with investors in the stock market. Sometimes there is irrational exuberance that results in a bubble, which ultimately bursts making holders of the stock disconsolate but perhaps creating an overall benefit that the stock value becomes more closely tied to fundamentals. Other times knowledgeable insiders withhold information so the unsuspecting public maintains a trust that isn’t warranted. Perhaps this second case can be further divided into stances where there is out and out fraud versus cases where the insiders intend to act reputably but get caught in trying to time their announcement rather than getting out the news immediately.

This comparison might help in trying to identify what it is we want among those alternatives that really are possible.

What’s interesting about the conversation taking place over on eduspaces is that, amidst all the talk of finding a new home for the site, no one is mentioning that they are talking about moving more than a simple php/mysql based app. Eduspaces has been entrusted with a large amount of personal data by end users — many of the people volunteering to take over the eduspaces site are connected with commercial entities working in the field, and access to the userbase of a self-selected group of educators has value as both a rolodex and as a means of studying online community. While I am sure they have the best of intentions, the issue of user privacy — and the steps any new host will take to ensure it — should at least be discussed by any entity volunteering as the new host.

While people are looking at the technical side of the issue (ie, hard drive space, processor resources, server configurations) they are completely overlooking the user privacy aspect of the problem.

Cheers,

Bill