[HCoop-Discuss] On organizing people to get work done

[Adam Chlipala]

At today's IRC HCoop board meeting, one of the big topics of discussion 
was how we should arrange our crew of volunteers, especially sysadmins. 
We wanted to take the discussion to the membership.  I'm going to start 
out by repeating some of my own points from the meeting, and other board 
members can reply with their additional points.  We encourage everyone 
to get involved in the discussion at any point.

I'll start with one claim that isn't obvious at first, but that I 
believe becomes obvious over time with an organization like ours, and 
that I think has important consequences for our staffing policies:
    Every sysadmin should commit to working on HCoop stuff during 
particular hours each week.  Sysadmins who habitually break their 
commitments should be replaced.

It's easy to think of HCoop like a hippie commune, where (in theory) 
everyone pitches in and everything gets done eventually.  This turns out 
not to be the case, though, especially when multiple people need to 
coordinate in getting things done.  Witness how long we've been working 
on getting a new mail server set up, to take on some of our main 
server's heavy load.  A decent organization with one paid full-time 
admin would have finished that task in a day, or maybe a week at most, 
even including time for new parts to be shipped.  I'm not trying to 
blame anyone for making things take this long.  The disorganized, 
drawn-out result is what we should expect given lack of structure 
governing when people are going to work on things.

That's why I'm proposing that we not accept volunteer time without 
official schedules that we can use to judge how long it will take to 
finish particular projects.  If people can't pledge enough time per 
week, then maybe they shouldn't be volunteering.  I've been talking up 
the idea of getting paid staff for years now, and that's an easy way to 
get people to up the amounts of time that they're willing to 
contribute.  The other board members are less keen on the idea, and they 
remain optimistic that we can find volunteers willing to commit enough 
time to make it possible for us to get things done.

The issue of paid vs. non-paid staff is not the primary one for me.  The 
primary issue is whether people can commit to doing particular work at 
particular times.  Pay can be a valuable tool for achieving that, but 
it's not the only one.


We need a few different kinds of sysadmin work.  Different people can do 
only subsets of these, and the different kinds of work need different 
kinds of time commitments.  In order of how easy it is to get people to 
commit enough time, we have:
1. Tech support for member bug reports/questions/requests/etc.
2. Completing parts of new infrastructure projects that can be done 
remotely from our physical machines
3. Tasks that must be done in the data center but that aren't emergencies
4. Emergency response, both in-person and remote

I find it plausible that we could keep varieties 1 through 3 in the 
hands of volunteers, and I find it highly implausible that we can meet 
member expectations for 4 without hiring paid staff such that someone is 
on call all (or almost all) of the time.  I also won't be surprised if 
we can't meet member expectations without paid staff doing all of these 
things.  Certainly our present performance is seriously lacking in all 
areas, such that our track record provides no evidence that we don't 
need paid staff.


How we decide to handle these issues has some implications for our basic 
hardware set-up.  If we hire staff who must be able to go to the data 
center, then we can save money by keeping our servers in a cheap city, 
where people can live well on less income.  The present location, New 
York City, is close to the worst possible choice, considered that way.  
I have more to say on what our physical hosting set-up should look like, 
but I'll leave the rest for a later thread.  I only wanted to bring this 
point up now because it should influence any hiring decisions we make.


So, what does everyone think?  Do we agree that all admins should make 
particular, enforced time commitments?  What total number of hours per 
week do we need devoted to each of the categories I listed above, to 
make sure we can meet member expectations?  What makes sense in terms of 
splitting admin duties between volunteers and paid staff?  (Paid staff 
would require raising dues, which is a discussion for another time, if 
we decide the benefit would be high enough.)