[HCoop-Discuss] Financial situation

[Adam Chlipala]

Terrence Brannon wrote:
> Again, this is not an exercise in finger-pointing, but if we provided
> an objective recount of what has happened so far to any IT
> professional, their curt assessment of the situation would be: "so you
> failed to handle the project management aspects of your project"...
> end of story.
>   

I certainly agree, and that's what I've been saying on this list 
recently.  However, it's not clear that anyone else among us could have 
done better, given the other constraints on his time from various 
aspects of his life.

I had a disadvantage going in: I had previously managed another 
migration effort that went much more smoothly, and so I expected this 
one to go as smoothly, thinking at every hang-up "this is just a minor 
setback, and we'll be back into our usual mode of operation any moment now."

I'll also note that I asked the admins to manage themselves and received 
various acknowledgments at various times that that would happen, yet 
kept feeling like _someone_ needed to step in and get things moving.  
So, though Terrence doesn't say it explicitly, it does seem he is trying 
to indite me in particular, so keep in mind the real management 
situation before agreeing with him. ;-)

It's also, IMO, much easier to manage construction of a single, 
well-defined software program than the nebulous set of factors that we 
need to have in order before we can open the new servers' doors to 
members.  It doesn't seem fair to compare directly with software.  We 
also have the constraint that every person involved needs root 
privileges (except for a tiny slice of all tasks that don't need this), 
so there is an inherent security reason to avoid delegation, and also to 
avoid restructuring staff once we get started.

> Not
> only that, but fyodor is not wal-mart: fyodor works well for everyone
> using it on a daily basis. We dont have something broken like
> wal-mart.
>   

Entirely wrong.  This has been discussed in several past threads in 
which you forget the previous discussions and claim indignantly that it 
has never been discussed.  There are several important reasons that 
fyodor is woefully inadequate for a good fraction of users, and by the 
end of the last discussion no one objected to expansion on those 
grounds, including you.  I won't waste time describing them to you here 
for at least the third time.

> Was the strategy for migration put before us as a coop? Were the
> project management and release control issues placed before us as a
> coop? What can we do as a coop to have better project management and
> release control?
>   

We've talked about this before.  There is no legal basis for a 
requirement of discussing these issues with members before making 
decisions, nor have we ever agreed on an informal culture that 
encourages that.  We made a conscious decision in the construction of 
our bylaws to have the members elect a board of directors that makes 
these decisions.