Why Document This?

In a volunteer, self-organised structure, there's no manager whose job is institutional memory. People arrive, contribute, and eventually move on — and when they do, whatever wasn't written down leaves with them. That's true for technical knowledge, and it's just as true for the reasoning behind decisions: why this provider and not another, why FOSS matters here specifically, why the organisation chose to run its own infrastructure rather than pay for SaaS.

Documenting the motivations and the organising framework — not just the setup steps — means the next person doesn't have to re-derive or re-argue what's already been settled. It also keeps the organisation honest with itself: reasoning that's written down can be checked, questioned, and revised deliberately, rather than drifting because nobody remembers why a decision was made in the first place. This document is part of that memory — everything here exists so the reasoning outlives any one contributor's involvement.

That memory doesn't stop mattering once something is decommissioned. Archiving is what carries documentation past the lifetime of whatever it describes, so a project that's gone is still worth explaining.

There's a newer reason too. AI now ingests entire documentation sets to answer questions, onboard people, and help maintain the infrastructure directly — so what's written here doesn't just sit for humans to read when they remember to, it becomes the context an assistant reasons from. That makes good documentation more valuable than it used to be, not less.