It appears the root of his problem is an old database in a weird format. If he just gave access (to the DB) I'm sure a fellow githuber / HNer could probably get the database converted correctly for him to some other DB or format.
Then again I probably don't fully understand all of the problems.
It's not that the database is in a weird format. It's that individual entries have multiple character encodings. The old perl CGI could handle that just fine, but trying to do anything with those files is a pain in the butt, which is why the site was offline in the first place. Ward was attempting to work with a static target instead of a moving target.
it took some digging but I managed to grab a dump of every page in JSON. he hid it well but I scraped everything and put it up for people to see (it's in its original markup form, and I'm working on converting it to HTML again.)
See also: https://github.com/WardCunningham/remodeling/issues/2 http://wardcunningham.github.io/