Any updates on Stack Exchange 1.0 migration?

Question

Now that several Area 51 sites are entering the beta phase, I'm wondering what the status is on migrating Stack Exchange 1.0 sites to 2.0, and what sites have already opted into the transition. I'm also wondering how many existing site proposals might be duplicates of these sites once they do transition, and how that will affect those proposals, whether they will be closed, merged, or left alone to create separate sites/communities.

I'm also curious about some of the demands that MathOverflow has made:

We have a set of 3 incontrovertible requirements for switching, all of which go against the rules for new StackExchange 2.0 sites.

1. Anton maintains personal ownership of the mathoverflow.net domain name.
2. We continue to have access to the full unsanitized database dumps.
3. Anton continues to have administrator privileges on the site.

(re: 2, all of the StackExchange 2.0 sites will have public data dumps equivalent to what we already provide here. At present, only Anton has access to the unsanitized dumps, and the main purpose of these is so that we can in principle jump ship to an alternative software base.)

I understand that they have a certain wariness about committing to Stack Exchange given the radical shift from SE 1.0 to 2.0, but points #1 and especially #2 seem directly in conflict with the network effect that SE 2.0 is trying to build by being prepared to tear itself away at a moment's notice.

On the other hand, MathOverflow was really the first site to prove the viability of Stack Exchange as a platform for Q&A topics outside the realm of computers, and so given this should they be 'grandfathered in' under SE 1.0 terms? What about other SE sites that make similar demands?

Answer 1

The reason for control of domain name and full data dumps are to allow for the possibility of moving to a competing similar platform if something goes bad with SO in the future (say they get bought by Elsevier). We academics have been bitten enough times by our journals being sold and turning evil after we'd already signed away all our rights to our work, we don't want the same thing happening to MO down the road. It's not that we don't trust the SO people, it's that we don't know what will happen in the future.

Anton as administrator is a separate issue from being just a moderator. My understanding (and Anton and Scott who are more involved can correct me if I'm wrong) is that there are two important things here: 1) Anton's ability to control certain aspects of the website's functionality (for example, how we display LaTeX) and 2) Benevolent dictatorship is a better model for keeping MO going in the direction we want it to go and for settling disputes about what the goals are and what is appropriate in terms of questions.

As for the funding issue brought up by George, by grants we mean money taken from professor's grants from the National Science Foundation. Such grants cover professor's travel expenses, fund graduate students, fund conferences, etc. The NSF likes its grants to include "broader impacts" which is a somewhat tricky concept, but MathOverflow clearly qualifies. When Anton originally started MO under the SE 1.0 model Ravi Vakil (a professor at Stanford) promised funding for several years out of his grant. Raising more money from other people's grants would be quite easy. The MO community has always been willing to pay SE (i.e. you give us x and we pay you y out of our grants), we'd also be open to certain other monetizing options (e.g. the SO careers thing seems fine to me), but we don't want ads because they'd make the site appear unprofessional.

Answer 2

Hopefully Noah's answer and the two meta.MO threads (link and link) have addressed the part of the question specific to MO. I'll just add a bit about the first part of the question.

Now that several Area 51 sites are entering the beta phase, I'm wondering what the status is on migrating Stack Exchange 1.0 sites to 2.0, and what sites have already opted into the transition.

As an admin of an SE 1.0 site, I haven't heard anything about migration since the blog post Migration of SE 1.0 Sites. I assume other admins haven't heard anything either, in which case none of them could have opted into the migration yet. You may be able to find some posts on meta.SE by SE admins vowing to migrate when the time comes.

The blog post is pretty firm about what the terms of migration will be, but it's also been made pretty clear that SE 1.0 sites will be dealt with on a case by case basis. I'm at least as curious as anybody else is about what will happen to successful SE 1.0 sites, but it's just not possible to take the conversation further until SO Inc. is actually ready to start migrating sites, or at least start discussing in detail what the terms of migration will be. But that's okay. It doesn't need to go any further until then. When the time comes to decide whether to migrate, SE 1.0 sites and SO Inc will have to figure out if it's possible to make everybody happy with migration. If yes, great! If no, that's okay too; it just means that everybody's interests are better served by not migrating. It doesn't mean that one side or the other is being unreasonable.

Answer 3

I am an ordinary user of Mathoverflow. Here is my perspective.

MO is the personal initiative of Anton Geraschenko, a graduate student at Berkeley, in which he was helped by a team of graduate students and recent graduates from the same place. He appears to be a very nice person. I would trust him much more than I would trust a corporate entity. I do not know anybody in stackexchange and while they might be individually quite nice people, the control would be ultimately in the hands of the corporate house. It is much easier to trust the warm and familiar and live person Anton who is just like us in every way, rather than trusting an abstract entity. I suspect that you will hear the same from most other users of Mathoverflow. Not to mention that legally Anton is the owner of Mathoverflow. I think he will get strong support from the community if he keeps the site as his. Here of course we are trusting him that he wouldn't sell the site in future to Elsevier or Springer or other corporate houses. But as I said it is easier to trust him than to trust Fog Creek. I myself would strongly root for Anton's side.

Also, what Harry Gindi said:

The reason why MO is different in this regard is that we have a lot of professional mathematicians, who, if harassed by jerks on the internet, would leave and offer their expertise elsewhere. – Harry Gindi Jul 10 at 18:18

That said, to be fair, I must also mention the advantages of Fog Creek handling the site. For one, the (mostly Berkeley) team of moderators would not have access to our personal information, as mentioned by Kyle Kronin. Also jerks(senior or junior) could be dealt with more effectively if the control is in the hands of Fog Creek. I was very impressed with stackoverflow's handling of problematic users, for example the case of this user. It was dealt very effectively. So in that kind of matters the control by an impersonal external corporate agency may be better.

Answer 4

According to this and this, http://basicallymoney.com has been migrated to http://money.stackexchange.com.