[HCoop-Discuss] Financial situation

[Nathan Kennedy]

Michael Potter wrote:
> There's been mention of having paid people responsible for the systems
> in shifts, and as any experienced sysadmin can tell you, you build a
> system, you own it. A setup with AFS+Kerberos and LDAP+SSL is not
> trivial to set up or maintain, I've been a Linux admin for years and
> I'm not sure I could take over the current setup without a huge
> learning curve.
You have a good point there in one respect.  A lot of our setup is 
fairly arcane and out "bus" or "beer truck" factor is pretty low right 
now.  The solution is clear to me; more and better documentation on the 
one hand, and an effort to actively train other members to be competent 
across multiple areas of HCoop administration in order to spread the 
expertise.  Obviously this hasn't been the highest priority recently 
with all the actual work going on and the small size meaning that it was 
hard enough to get anyone interested.  But this is something that I have 
been thinking about personally and would like to see implemented.
Building the wiki's current content into a comprehensive site-wide 
knowledge base, and also developing somewhat more formal tutorial 
training program would also be worthwhile.  Not just of organization and 
administrative tasks, but also of internal workings.
The biggest hole is domtool and the portal, especially given that they 
are written in SML, a fine and underutilized language.  Adam is probably 
the only person who understands the whole thing, since he built it.  
I've poked at it a bit myself, and it's exciting to see Adam M, Davor, 
and others dig in and extend the code.
> The people who are putting it together right now will
> be the best qualified, and possibly the only ones qualified, to run
> it. It's also been mentioned that exponential growth is intended.
>
> These things together seem to point towards current admins becoming
> the paid admins. 
>   
Here I think you are off-base.  If I understand it correctly you fear 
that HCoop's current "power structure" is planning on leveraging their 
incumbency and system knowledge into paid positions for themselves.  I 
can say this is not going to happen.  Maybe you are thinking of Adam and 
myself, since we are directors, Adam founded HCoop and wrote the code, 
and I do the on-site maintenance.  Actually, neither of us are formal 
admins now (of the board only Davor is, working remotely from his 
central European offices).  If you think either of us is interested in 
working full-time for HCoop, you haven't been paying much attention.  
HCoop can't possibly afford Adam, since his ambition for filthy lucre 
exceeds the combined net worth of all HCoop members.  As for myself, I 
have a full-time engineering job and a law degree in works.  HCoop is 
important to me, but a paid position for HCoop does not fit into my 
career path either.  Beyond that I know plenty about conflicts of 
interest and I don't think it would be appropriate for a boardmember to 
hire himself.

In any event, we are all in agreement that paid staff for HCoop is not 
part our current planning, and is not going to happen for a long time.  
Some form of contract labor may be necessary in the closer future (after 
all, that's what standard "remote hands" service is), but need not be 
part of the discussion now.

-ntk