[OSGeo-Discuss] Fwd: [SAC] Upgrade Planning 2014 - Project Feedback

[Alex Mandel]

Please add the idea of paid SAC time to the wiki page.

I did contemplate this after the last board meeting where it was
mentioned. A few ideas,
* Stipend for up to a set limit of hours per month,
** Hours maybe approved by the committee before working
* Earning points towards things like Foss4g discounts
* Out-sourcing some tasks (we need a good list of reputable people to
use - this was tried on Drupal upgrades for the main site and has thus
far failed)
* Special sponsor role if a sponsor volunteers person time instead of $?

I too am curious about what other foundation's due short of just hiring
staff.

This also came up recently, apparently the OGC is relying on us to keep
standards examples online and running all the time. If we're going to
play that role, seems like a line of funding to pursue.

Thanks,
Alex

On 04/21/2014 11:02 AM, Daniel Morissette wrote:
> Hardware is important, but let's not forget that system administrator
> time is at least as important to keep an infrastructure running smoothly.
> 
> Can we find ways to avoid relying solely on volunteer time to support
> the infrastructure? What about including funded sysadmin time in our new
> plan?
> 
> Not that the SAC (System Administration Committee) team is not doing a
> good job (quite the contrary, kudos to you all), but I think that
> relying solely on volunteer time for some things is not fair to the SAC
> team and is a high risk for OSGeo (risk of exhausting the volunteers).
> Contributors to open source projects can in general find clients to fund
> their time, but contributions to SAC are not something that anyone's
> client are going to pay for, so I think it something that OSGeo should
> help support directly.
> 
> That being said, I'll be first to admit that mixing money and people in
> a non-profit organization is always complicated. So, short of
> outsourcing everything, how can we handle funded sysadmin time in a fair
> way vs volunteer contributions? Are there good examples to follow in
> other non-profit orgs? (These are open questions to everyone, I don't
> have the answers)
> 
> Daniel
> 
> 
> On 14-04-18 7:50 PM, Alex Mandel wrote:
>> Calling all Project Steering Committees, SAC is looking at the future of
>> OSGeo hosted services. Please chime in with your wants and needs for the
>> next 3-5 years. We want to maximize services while being efficient about
>> effort (pooling sys admin time amongst projects).
>>
>> http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Infrastructure_Transition_Plan_2014
>>
>> More details below.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Alex
>> OSGeo Sys Admin Committee Chair
>>
>>
>> -------- Original Message --------
>> Subject: [SAC] Upgrade Planning 2014
>> Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2014 15:25:41 -0700
>> From: Alex Mandel <tech_dev at wildintellect.com>
>> Reply-To: tech at wildintellect.com, System Administration Committee
>> Discussion/OSGeo <sac at lists.osgeo.org>
>> To: System Administration Committee Discussion/OSGeo
>> <sac at lists.osgeo.org>
>>
>> In light of our recent hardware woes, the ending of osgeo1, and the age
>> of current machines (3-4yrs) I think it's time to start planning what to
>> do next.
>>
>> We do have budget, and the board is interested in ideas and additional
>> funding is not out of the question.
>>
>>  From my perspective, I think we need:
>> 1. To survey PSC of all projects to assess what services we should
>> offer. Do we need buildbots, sphinx builds, mail service, issue
>> tracking, various CMS/wiki, mirrors, bandwidth for downloads? Now that
>> everyone is love with Github (any word on what the next hot host will
>> be), are there things we should retire?
>>
>> 2. Look at other hosting options besides physical machines in one place.
>> Renting space like QGIS or OSM, racking machines elsewhere, getting
>> OSGeo-ICA labs to mirror. If we do mirror look at GeoCDN and MirrorBrain
>> for geo-ip redirection balancing.
>>
>> 3. Look at new hardware that better meets the needs. RAID is nice but
>> not always the right answer to needs as we discovered recently. We also
>> didn't buy specific to Ganeti/Cloud style setups where hotcopy failover
>> works best with multiple identical machines, and lots of smaller disks
>> with single disks per VM keeps i/o from competing (RAID is handled in
>> mirror mode via DRBD over the network between nodes).
>>
>> Anyone want to tackle making a short survey for Projects to describe
>> their needs and wishes?
>>
>>
>> All ideas welcome, we'll pool it all into proposal and a wiki page
>> before deciding on anything.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Alex
>> _______________________________________________
>> Sac mailing list
>> Sac at lists.osgeo.org
>> http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/sac
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Discuss mailing list
>> Discuss at lists.osgeo.org
>> http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
>>
> 
>