[Board] 2009 budget

[Dave McIlhagga]

For what it's worth -- I'm with Howard on this.

I think investment in infrastructure for projects will certainly  
provide a lot more tangible benefit for OSGeo then marketing  
activities. The technologies are seeing mass adoption without much  
promotional effort -- so it seems sensible to me that making sure our  
house is in order should take top priority while extending our  
promotion of the organization and it's projects more of a bonus.

Dave


On 15-Nov-08, at 7:36 PM, Frank Warmerdam wrote:

> Howard Butler wrote:
>> Where I'm going with this is in my (biased) opinion, SAC is hurting  
>> for resources.  We are starting to approach the exhaustion point  
>> for volunteer administration for a number of tasks (as witnessed by  
>> tickets sent to SAC that are never acted upon), and we are starting  
>> to approach the saturation point for hardware resources like the  
>> heavily-overloaded download.osgeo.org (the "server" item in the  
>> budget plans to address this).
>
> Howard,
>
> It is relatively tangential to the point, but xblade12 is the machine
> that has been suffering problems and it mostly due to to many  
> activities
> on one modest machines.  Moving most build slaves off to the buildtest
> blade should help in this regard - though here we really start to
> see the volunteer fatigue issue.
>
> >  Our Peer1 resources need to be balanced out to provide better
>> utilization, and that will require quite a bit of effort.  I  
>> personally would like to see us investing some experimental efforts  
>> into virtual (cloud-like) operations similar to AWS, whether via  
>> OSL, or virtualization at TelaScience, or other.  Hardware  
>> management is a headache, and if it can be avoided all the  
>> better.    I would like SAC to be able to draw upon some paid  
>> manpower to help with some of the stickier tasks that have  
>> continued to be pushed off, like fixing up our single-signon/LDAP.   
>> As time approaches infinity, tasks like these will get done  
>> voluntarily, but paid manpower would shrink down that timeline and  
>> allow us to provide better service.
>
> I would like to see a more specific proposal for what funded  
> manpower for
> SAC might look like.  In the past I've pursued this haphazardly with
> the Indictrans folks but my general concern is that "first world"
> rates for an experienced system administrator are going to eat through
> money pretty quickly.  At the very least we would need some clear
> prioritization on what should and shouldn't be done.
>
> So generally, I'm keen on improving SAC's service, and additional
> funding does not seem unreasonable.  I just think we need to have
> a better idea of what that would like like.  I'd love to see a  
> proposed
> budget from SAC.
>
>> SAC is a major service wing of OSGeo.  If we provide bad service,  
>> projects will walk, and we'll loose one of the great collective  
>> benefits that OSGeo provides.  No amount of marketing gets us out  
>> of that predicament.  For the board, the questions to ask are where  
>> to invest our limited resources and when.  SAC will continue to  
>> limp along, but the more we do that the more we risk having  
>> projects leave or not simply not participate.  With a flat budget,  
>> SAC will continue to limp.
>
> Well run SAC services would indeed be a tangible benefit to the  
> projects.
>
> I also think marketing is important for a number of reasons, but given
> a stated need, and plan I think we can find some balance of resources.
>
> Best regards,
> -- 
> --------------------------------------- 
> +--------------------------------------
> I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
> light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
> and watch the world go round - Rush    | Geospatial Programmer for  
> Rent
>
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