[Board] Motion regarding Systems Support for non-OSGeo Projects, and Fusion (and Motion)

[Howard Butler]

On Dec 10, 2007, at 10:21 AM, Arnulf Christl wrote:

> -0
>
> The simple reason being that 2 business days is impossible for me to
> handle, especially if this include looking into things from a  
> political or
> legal point of view.
>
> I only said -0 because you mention that hobu explicitly wanted us to
> consider this. If you would extend the period for consideration to 5
> business days I am +1 on this.
>
> To be honest I don't really know why the OSGeo board should have an
> opinion or even veto rights on this process at all? SAC is all  
> volunteers,
> telascience infrastructure is donated to OSGeo without any strings
> attached so what is the board deciding here anyway?
>

As Bob pointed out, the resources that SAC shepherds for "project  
infrastructure" are paid for by OSGeo, and IMO, are ultimately the  
responsibility of the board.  My thinking with the cooling off period  
and submission to the board was mostly related to the forking  
scenario.... Say some subgroup of an existing OSGeo project came to  
SAC asking for infrastructure support for their fork of project XX,  
and they had a sympathetic ear on the SAC committee who would be  
willing to do the work for them?  Do we provide infrastructure in that  
case?

I don't want the SAC committee to concern itself at all with an issue  
like this that I consider to be more political than technical.  A  
decision has to be made, of course, but I would rather see the body  
responsible for causing the strife to be the OSGeo board rather than  
causing strife internally within SAC.  IMO, SAC should worry about the  
nuts and bolts of keeping the lights on, not choosing sides or  
straddling the fence in a project forking war.

A five day objection period for the board would be a good compromise  
from my perspective.  I'm not looking to just gum up the works with  
this, and having to wait a week isn't going to be the end of the world  
(I agree that waiting until the next board meeting and making sure  
there is a quorum and it gets on the agenda -- the current process --  
is a PITA and very slow).


>> From this perspective I wonder whether this is meant to provide  
>> some sort
> of shielding mechanism against overwork and project inundation of  
> SAC that
> would endanger operation of OSGeo infrastructure.

I proposed this as a shielding mechanism from political strife related  
to choosing who's in and who's out for infrastructure support within  
SAC.

Maybe someday we will have our infrastructure so push-button that  
setup and maintenance costs are essentially nil, and the only cost  
related to adding a new project is computing resources.  Until that  
time, even with a volunteer to do the immediate work, adding a new  
project to our infrastructure increases the support load on all of SAC  
a little bit.

Bureaucratically yours,

Howard