[HCoop-Discuss] Membership freeze?

[Terrence Brannon]

I hope the below does not create permanent enemies of me and Adam and
Nathan. But since they are both in NYC now, perhaps they can deal with
in-your-face arguments without permanently having ruffled feathers.

On the other hand, this post is opening up a whole new vista for me. I
had been thinking of getting an MBA and now I am starting to see why
it is important. Again, sorry for the harsh wording below, but no need
to cut corners, let's just get this aired out.

On 5/12/07, Adam Chlipala <adamc at hcoop.net> wrote:
> I propose that we freeze membership until we get to the point where new
> members can have their accounts set up only on the new servers and find
> there all of the services they need.

What would you say is the highest priority of the hcoop? Reducing
duplicate work of volunteers? Engineering the best software system for
cooperative hosting? Insuring constant revenue? Reducing cost by
increasing member base?

I would say that latter 2 are most important and nothing should ever
be done to decrease this. The first 2 are considerations, but the last
2 are necessities.

It seems that the hcoop is in serious need of enterprise-level
business administration skills if a couple of desires are taking
precedence over 2 necessities.

> We're ready to start setting
> current members up on the new servers, and I don't think it's fair to
> expect volunteer admins to do anything serious on fyodor anymore.

This was said 2 weeks ago. So you want to lose customers for 2 weeks
and irritate the current ones. In addition to lacking ability to
manage projects (the project being keeping the current infrastructure
and economic model sane while transitioning to something apparently
better), you are now cutting into what I see as the bottom line: the
money source - current and potential new members.

Not only that, but it is not clear how much longer both sets of people
will be inconvenienced by this.

If you want the privilege of divorcing yourself from the old
architecture then you have the responsibility of a timeline for doing
so.  Sure, you can hack on SMLweb ad hoc whenever you want, but you
are running a business with performance and service obligations to a
large (and growing) number of people who were promised pricing within
a certain range. We were also promised democratic decision-making and
punctual service.

I'm not being insulting when I say this, but perhaps you should rename
yourself Benevolent Dictator for Life over Adam's Hosting Lab instead
of elected Board Member of HCOOP. It really is more appropriate.You
dominate the decision making but equally are dominant in mindshare and
effort.

And me? well I bring in a good number of new members via advertising.
But it's just an occasional thing. I am here to have easy-to-use
low-cost hosting and I still have it, even though the financial stats
of hcoop are not so good at the moment. As long as I can keep
benefitting daily, I will stay. But I do see issues from a business
perspective and feel they need to be aired.

But I am currently far less proactive about mentioning hcoop when
people need hosting because of how things are running.


>
> I also want to go further and suggest declaring an official policy of
> not accepting any more support requests having to do with fyodor,
> excepting emergencies relating to established services.  We would
> acknowledge that this means that members won't be able to achieve
> reasonable levels of service in some cases, but that our volunteer
> workforce simply isn't able/willing to spend time on setting up stuff
> that will be retired ASAP.

I know how irritating it is to have to deal with the old when the new
thing is much nicer. Everyone likes svn instead of cvs. Everyone wants
the latest version of gcc. But the reality of running a business again
has the bottom line of insuring current and potential customer
satisfaction, not producing the best and latest software.

Perhaps there should be a small charge associated with support requests?

>
> Any objections to these ideas?  Objections "on principle" that ignore
> the real costs of different policies to the admins will be summarily
> ignored. ;)

This sentence implies that you have a certain bottom line - work
reduction. A volunteer is just that. I think the question becomes can
the model of free ad hoc workers acceptably sustain a growing
organization. It seems that there are no metrics or understanding of
the ratio of member request to volunteer time. Simply a blind myopic
emphasis on reducing this ratio.

What does our objection matter? Why do you call this a coop if we
really cant influence major decision-making? Our money and potential
new money mean nothing to you, save when you can petition for
donations for open-ended tinkering.

Again, I realize this is harsh email. But I am not trying to making
Adam, Nathan or Davor look like idiots. And of course, it is very easy
for me to sit here, out of the line of fire and toss pot-shots at the
people who are bending over backwards to keep this thing going. But
passion without insight can lead to failed projects... just look at
Perl 6, the GNU Hurd, the Iraq War, etc, etc.

I realize that Nathan and Adam are already taxed to the max. But is
their effort directed in the most constructive way to maintain a
business? And ia this is a business or hobby project. There certainly
is a healthy amount of "I will do this my way, when I want and how I
want and you can't say or do anything about it but leave" attitude
here. Which means this is not a cooperative. And when costs for setup
balloon into the thousands with no immediate benefits, then it is not
a co-op either.

I suppose this could be considered cooperative internet hosting in
that a number of people are cooperating to experiment with internet
hosting. But it can't be considered a cooperative in the same way as
the ones I have been a part of and which had to stay afloat
financially - housing cooperatives which had to pay rent. Food
cooperatives which have to compete with whole foods.
While the new software infrastructure might make hcoop the very best
software for internet cooperative hosting, it is currently a project
in the red financially. And while this would not be tolerated in any
place with money as its objective, perhaps we can look on the bright
side at ourselves as a living, breathing experiment in the evolution
of cooperative hosting and donate our experience in this to the open
source world at large.

In the same way that the FSF was so focused on experimenting with free
software that the component that could have made them the most money
was never finished and then had its thunder stolen by Linux.

All the best,
Terrence

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