First of all, as I'm sure you aware, we aim to run our site democratically. It's not me you ultimately need to convince, but our members. I am telling you this because my own interest is almost exclusively in the forum and IRC, so while I'm going to try my best to speak for everyone, what I say here isn't final.
I should also make you aware that after the previous attempt went dead in the water, we put a lot of work into improving our own homepage, social media and so forth, under the assumption that reunification wasn't going to happen. It is going to be more difficult to come to an agreement now because we are in a much better position than before. Not to beat about the bush, you will likely need to make more concessions than were made in the agreement we had come to with Daniel two years ago in order for any deal to appeal to us.
The wiki would need to be discussed. Our societies differ on many points of theory and much of your wiki has very controversial content to the FE community at large. I'd like to make sure this is dealt with in an appropriate way, as I've spent a lot of time interviewing and revising content to help remove this stigma. I'm fine with it being represented. UA comes to mind, and I'd like it to be openly known that this is a discounted view in many circles. Dubay is mostly to blame for this. In my work, I get a lot of shit about this on a daily basis, and I feel these differences cause a number of issues.
You are welcome to have your own wiki, but if you want it to be the Flat Earth Society's official wiki we need to come to an agreement on how we deal with this disparity. I'd like to look at you guys as a chapter of the Society, and ourselves as one as well. Our wiki will bite the dust either way.
I personally have almost nothing to do with our wiki (that's PizzaPlanet's baby). This sounds reasonable to me in principle, provided we can come to some agreement, but I can guarantee that no reunification will happen without our wiki being preserved in some form.
No, our two groups will coexist, but this forum will be shifted in its usage as the new platform gets integrated to be more of a social hub. This is a long term project, so it will come when it comes. I will say I have a good amount of the backend work done to this end.
This doesn't sound like a good approach to me, as it will confuse new members. What purpose will dividing discussion between two communities serve? Are both going to be linked from the homepage? What will differentiate them?
Both social media presences can co-exist. This seems pretty clean cut. We seem to be strong in the areas you are weak, and vice versa.
This seems similarly confusing to new members. We'd end up with two "official" Twitter accounts, for instance. Again, are we going to link both from the homepage, or is your intent that one die off quietly?
At first, front page will be editor access. You can post stuff as you feel the need. You guys don't really do so that often, and its always stuff I think we'd all approve of anyways. As we regain each others trust, I'm fine upping this to a wider access. The same system controls everything from cron jobs, to the forums, to the front page, so too much at first is a bit of a scary proposition.
Provided we can post content to the front page when we need to, this seems reasonable to me (but again, I'm not the one normally doing so on our side).
The home page will soon be changed over to the new platform (next month is the roadmap, but since its just me its pretty fuzzy.) If you have someone that knows OO php, and is comfortable working in frameworks that are similar to laravel, I have no problem giving them access to git to fix software issues once I'm confident they won't be borking shit up and can follow standards. I will essentially have to interview them to determine competence. The system I'm creating for us is a bit complex compared to what both of us have in place, but I know you have some smart cookies in your camp that should be able to handle it. As I know open source is important to some of you, I will make this system open source.
I have no doubt that we would be up to the job, but while we're on the subject of competence, I think this works both ways. What assurances do our members have that the long-standing problems this site has had with outages, hacking events and random breakage on the homepage won't be continued from your side?
I'm also open to giving access to the server for those types of maintenance issues. We will likely be looking at upgrading our server situation to a more modular setup, so I'm sure some of your guys expertise can come in handy. Access will be given when we start setting everything up, so you can participate in the future of the society and the technical decisions that go with that.
Sounds reasonable to me, provided we can have a reasoned discussion about technical decisions.
As far as the subdomain, we can draft a contract, if you'd like. I've found that pursuing legal action over seas is particularly hard, so I'm open to suggestion. The fact of the matter is that either of us can fuck each over in a number of ways beyond this. We are all clever folks, otherwise we wouldn't know the truth. A reasonable neutral board is a first step many organizations take in these matters, but I'm not convinced that's useful to us or even something that is possible.
I'm not convinced it's true that either of us can fuck each other over. Your proposal seems to involve you holding all (or at least most) of the keys. You would control the domain registration, the DNS, this forum's database, and get to decide who gets access to make changes.
I have a feeling this point will be the biggest obstacle to reunification, since it fundamentally requires us to be able to trust each other. This thread's existence is solid evidence that we aren't there yet.
Finally, and unmentioned, our side will create our brand book, and decide exactly who the flat earth society is. This includes logo, tone, colors, fonts, mission, etc. I'd like us to be unified on this front and for folks to follow the guidelines, which will be reasonable.
I am personally okay with that, but as I previously stated, I can't speak for everyone.
We will also handle membership. The store is fine for you guys to control, but eventually I'd like to see this unified with the rest of the platform and society. E-commerce is last on the last of things for me to handle on the platform, so in the interim I'm fine with your cafe press or whatever you are using now a days. I'd like to see the money go into a fund we can all draw from for various activities such as membership packages, advertisements, and other things that would benefit the society.
SexWarrior's clarification aside, this sounds reasonable to me. We currently don't have a membership register, and you currently don't have a store, so this seems like a non-issue.
I can also write up the code and query (or provide a rest interface) for a unified post history if you'd like, without need for the database to be merged.
This sounds more complicated than merging the database, since it needs to be maintained forever more instead of being a one-time event. Why do you want to approach it in this way?