Probably downvoted for resorting to juvenile name-calling when someone else didn't diagnose and fix a problem in your local installation of a free software project for you.
From what I can tell, HOA experiences - like politics - are highly dependent on the folks who would make good decision-makers actually being interested in, and attaining, the level of power in the association to make those decisions.
I've seen both - folks who are good stewards of the community's money and add to its energy, and folks who can't manage money and exhaust the community's energy on trivialities.
Maybe - but if it's not handled by the school, then there's going to be some sort of access problem for some kids. Transportation, time to do it, financial for the parents, etc.
What's the right balance on perfect-is-the-enemy-of-the-good here?
On the one hand, centralization makes a potentially low-interest or high-expense experience more viable. On the other hand, equity.
When is it appropriate to trade some equity for an experience that would otherwise be unfeasible in a every-school-does-it-themselves cause everyone's budget cutting?
I really don't think this is the actual problem here. A town with multiple high schools is too big for a single central youth woodworking shop.
A town with multiple underfunded schools is not going to have the resources to provide this anyway, or if they do it's because of specific values & policies that are incompatible with providing universal services to citizens.
But once you have decided to do this, and come up with some funding for it somehow: should you use the currently existing infrastructure in place to move children around, and the adults in place with experience working with them, and the bureaucratic apparatus in place to manage them etc etc or should you just build a completely new thing that will totally be better.
Every non-programmer sees the obvious answer immediately. There's no tradeoff here really, these classes belong in middle and high school.
The only reasonable alternative is libraries but they have the same funding issues. The problem is the choice we have made to underfund these institutions. If you're working within these constraints without being able to change the funding, public schools have the most of the apparatus in place already, compared to the alternatives.
> A town with multiple high schools is too big for a single central youth woodworking shop.
I didn't think you wanted every single school kids to do woodworking. Woodworking is great, but what about potery ? What about gardening ? Film photography ? Robotics ?
It makes a lot more sense to me to have an independent entity offering curriculum that residents can express demand for and choose from, than a single activity every school maintains and pushes kids through to make up for the investment. In particular this means that you're not bound to specific age ranges and the same facilities can be used by adult beginners in late night spots for instance.
This is my first entry in this conversation, I'm not sure what the original commenter had in mind.
But I had just picked woodworking for an example but no. I want them to also have access to welding, sewing, cooking, gardening etc. Some of these can be offered very cheaply, some can't.
I still don't think it would usually make sense for them all to be centralized somewhere other than a school. In places with multiple schools, they may not all have every resource available, and students may have to be shifted around to get them to the tools and educators they need.
But this is already the case in a lot of the US! and esp at the high school level not every school has every program when talking about things like marching band, robotics, individual sports, rotc.
I actually teach an after school programming class at the local high school, interested students are bussed over from several other schools in the district immediately after the last class. There is a whole subfleet of buses to shift kids around so they end up at the correct other school for baseball practice or python class or whatever. So this is already a live problem with working solutions in some districts.
> independent entity offering curriculum that residents can express demand for and choose from
Kind of like a community college? That seems to be the most similar existing institution to what we're talking about. Or should high schools just work more like community colleges?
IDK. Again though I think the solution is just to adequately fund the education system we have rather than try to make a new, side-by-side, intentionally incomplete one. If there's no additional funding coming, then that won't work either and public schools are still the entity that is closest to being able to meet this need with the least additional resources.
I think the fundamental issue could be that these cities require kids to be bussed around, which is an issue I wouldn't know how to solve.
If that could be solved, kids moving from school to their crafting courses isn't much an issue. On the management part, you need a dedicated teachers either way, they can be paid by the school or paid by the town, that doesn't make much difference for them (except perhaps a lower level of certification between a full blown school teacher and someone with a limited teaching license)
On the curriculum, if there is some certification given at the end of the courses I see how being part of a school helps, but if it's targeted at learning and/or enjoying the craft it's less impacting (in particular for things like cooking, gardening. etc)
This is the model most European cities take as far as I know.
Yes, depending on the city it can be more or less complex. It comes down to how kids are viewed, and a good indicator could be how libraries are handled.
How much does the local library cost ? is it easy for kids to access ? is there a library in the first place ?
If the local library is thriving, a community center can be an extension of that. If it's dead, that city is in a pretty bad place from the start.
Counter-counterargument: "So as long as there is good documentation" feels a bit like relying for success on the least important deliverable to people funding a project, and least interesting process step to people building it, going really well.
The whole thing feels very "old school Internet" in a way - a bunch of misfits with a manifesto and an intentionally simple website.
It sounds like they were never able to bridge the gap of turning the casual interest of folks expressing their counter-culture into enough money to survive. To their credit, it's much better to recognize when they did that the utopian experiment wasn't a viable business, than to try to drag more funds out of folks to keep it on life-support.
I think it's also worth lauding their approach to a shutdown. They informed users it was going to happen nearly a month in advance, and the userbase proceeded to use that time to mourn, celebrate, exchange contact info with their friends, help one another build personal sites and/or organize taking refuge with other websites and communication tools. At the beginning of October the site was "frozen" and every user was emailed a link for downloading machine-readable archives of every post, comment, and user preference from their accounts. Cohost remains read-only browsable until the end of the year, after which the founders intend to forward their domain to an archive.org-hosted snapshot of everything public.
These days you're lucky to get a few day's notice and a "thanks for the incredible journey, now get the hell out" email when a site folds.
Disappointing that a website that touts itself for, among other things, "Open Source News", is missing the core definition issue in that headline: what is at issue here has zero to do with how open or closed the source code is. It's only related to how free/libre the license is.
That's a big deal to some, no doubt, but it's important to be precise about language in cases like this, especially since folks will undoubtedly assume that this means secret user-hostile things will now be embedded in the source code, sight-unseen.
What % of those sysadmins are then going to turn around and script something to auto-approve those updates, once they realize that they are A) requested at inconvenient times and B) are related to security?
Who's going to take the risk of appearing to have sat on an important update, while the org they support is ravaged by ThreatOfTheDay, because they thought they knew better than a multi-billion dollar, tops-in-their-field company?
(I'm not necessarily saying that's actually objectively correct, but I can't imagine that many folks are willing to risk the downside)
