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#235 - A volunteer for migration

Warning: this article was written over 9 years ago, some information may be out of date.

This morning I read an advertisement from an association asking for a volunteer to migrate their website from one hosting to another and possibly make the site, built with WordPress, more streamlined and easier to maintain.

I do not usually enter into these matters, and what follows is my personal opinion, not revealed truth; I do not name the association because, in reality, this applies to anyone with a similar approach.

First, migration from one hosting to another is not exactly a simple operation: each hosting has its settings and, in some cases, its limitations. This means that one needs to know well the site one is migrating to, with its peculiarities, and the hosting to which one is migrating; the fact that it has been created with a CMS does not mean that it follows the standard settings of that CMS; on the contrary, one is often faced with particular customisations, which require special attention.
This means, in other words, that if the volunteer you find is not a professional, you may have difficulties. If, on the other hand, one is lucky and finds a professional, the time they will have to devote to this activity will likely be limited. In both cases, it is not possible to ask for an assumption of responsibility in case something goes wrong because, in the first case, there are not enough skills; in the second, there is a lack of time, and in both cases, we are talking about free work anyway (according to one of the definitions in the Treccani dictionary, freely done or granted, without any particular merit or right on the part of the recipient). In other words, the person may be unable or unwilling to intervene and would have every right to do so.

The website, for an association, as for a company, is an essential communication tool to which, at the very least, time must be devoted for the drafting of the content, and a minimum of money, e.g. for the payment of the domain, and in this case also of hosting.
So what is the point of entrusting this tool to a volunteer, with all the risks involved? The idea that emerges is that a site is, in the end, just four little pages on the web, which my cousin can also modify, and that it is not worth allocating/seeking funds to make it a more functional tool for one’s purposes instead.

I wish the association luck and success, but I hope this approach will change and they will realise the importance of relying on experts. This also means properly remunerating the work those experts will do.

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