Discussion

Building FireStriker: Why I'm Making Civic Tech Free

aaronbrethorst: I have some experience in this space and I want to strongly encourage the author to reconsider their free as in beer model.Yes, your target users don’t have a lot of money, but they also deserve a sense of whether or not you’re going to keep maintaining this project. Additionally, they are generally NOT technical and will not have the skills necessary to set up or maintain this platform.Without a paid offering, they will have to run the software and will not have any clarity about your long term commitment to the project. Feel free to reach out to me. My email address is in my profile.

caesil: Kind of sad to see AI water use as the first listed issue motivating this.It is a completely fake concern. See here: https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake

knowaveragejoe: Okay. There are other criticisms of datacenter buildout that make this kind of product valuable. Moving on.