[HCoop-Discuss] My hats

[Adam Chlipala]

I feel like I need to repeat this same general schpiel again: Everything I'm writing has only to do with the co-op's future well-being.  If any problems are ironed out already, then I'm satisfied.  For some people, writing what I wrote would be meant as a personal attack.  Not so for me; I never use extended figurative language or innuendos on these lists.

To justify my seriousness, I can only say that I and several admins have become _extremely_ frustrated trying to coordinate with ntk recently, to the point of ALL-CAPS SHOUTING on IRC and in private e-mail.  I consider a volunteer's communication regime independently of the hats he wears, hence my written doubts about ntk as a board member.  Since we volunteers aren't robots, shared frustration alone is a conclusive sign of a problem.

-----Original Message-----
From: "Nathan Kennedy" <ntk at hcoop.net>

>It is for (4) and (4) alone that it is important that I be rapidly
available to perform on maintenance to move things along and to avoid or
remedy downtime.

I think it's also important to be available to vote new members in.  Also, you agreed to 48 hour response to _everything_, so post-hoc analysis of individual situations doesn't really do much to mitigate the main problem, which is communication among admins. We don't take the time to write out explicit rules of communication just to have people "use their own judgment" in cases where the rules give a clear procedure.  The cultural differences among us are too deep to make that feasible.

>...I'd be more than happy to resign.  I'd also
be happy to be fired from this role, but I'd vote against firing myself at
this point as hardware monkey in view of the above because I don't see how
that's going to IMPROVE our hardware situation.

Paying $150/hr. is worth it to me to allow planning that involves multiple people's schedules (Peer 1 techs are paid to provide such services, so we can expect them to keep their appointments), if we don't need to ask for their help too often, so deciding officially that we won't bother trying to get any of us to the colo could be a big improvement.

>Also, while I would also thank Adam for his ongoing involvement and
leadership and for setting a decent example in terms of availability, I
would also appreciate it if he would be a little less consistently
belittling about my performance of time-consuming, menial tasks which he
himself is unwilling to do.

"Belittling" is an emotionally-driven activity which I can promise I'm not engaging in.

I encourage everyone to voice grievances like this, because it's better to talk about it than to build up vague animosity.  However, I have to disagree with the validity of any objective part of your complaint.  As board members, we should make decisions based on value to the co-op.  Your (several times) volunteering to do something at Peer 1 at particular times, and then not showing up and not notifying anyone until hours later, has provided _negative_ value to the co-op.  The admins were waiting for you for hours on IRC, using up their weekly quotas of how much they can handle doing for the co-op before Emergency Me Time kicks in.

I am not making a personal attack against anyone or trying to punish anyone  I am just surprised that you are describing your recent Peer 1 service as just a roll-back of a volunteer's availability, rather than an active disruption of our migration effort, where we would be better off if you had just said from the start that you couldn't make it on the days in question.  (And if you had gotten word to hcoop-sysadmin when you couldn't make your appointments.)

>I am particularly bewildered at the idea that I have totally abdicated all
my duties to HCoop....

As a concrete example, you have a few hours left before 48 hours from when this was posted.  It's addressed to you in particular, and clearly only you can answer it.

https://bugzilla.hcoop.net/show_bug.cgi?id=102