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

[David Snider]

What are people's feelings about buying into a few Virtual Private Servers
rather than having our own dedicated hardware? You'd think the more
fine-grained scalability of this type of setup along with not having to
worry about 'one-time-costs' that we've had in the past would benefit an
organization like ours.

On Thu, 07 May 2009 15:05:45 -0400, Adam Chlipala <adamc at hcoop.net> wrote:
> Michael Potter wrote:
>> I personally didn't reply because when I've disagreed with the party
>> line in the past, I've been shouted down and silenced, and I know the
>> party line around here is your paid staff.
> 
> I don't remember any party line.  Anyone is welcome to disagree with
> anyone else.  I think you spent a lot of bandwidth arguing for a
> position that wasn't shared by many other members; everyone needs to
> know how to realize when enough is enough, and his message has already
> been conveyed as best as is possible.  But, please, don't hold back from
> sharing your opinion on any issues relevant to the running of HCoop.
> 
>> I don't like how having
>> employees will create a class of member who is bound to serve us (as
>> opposed to the respect we give volunteers who are doing us a favor).
>>
> 
> So you're saying you don't trust people to set monetary values on their
> own efforts?  If you _do_ trust in that, then there is no worry that
> anyone will be "serving us" without adequate compensation.  Or are you
> somehow opposed to the idea of work for pay in the abstract?
> 
>> Also, I think paid staff will involve a rate increase, and I personally
>> don't want to pay extra for that.
>>
> 
> There are two main categories of benefit we'd see from any kind of
> improvement and quantity and reliability of admin effort.
> 
> First, we have emergency response, which has the diabolical property
> that you don't realize how bad you're lacking for it until you have a
> big disaster.  I submit that you may be mentally overvaluing the quality
> of HCoop services that you're receiving now for the current price,
> because we haven't happened to have a big data loss or hardware failure
> disaster yet.  To me, $10/mo. vs. $5/mo. is worthwhile for the peace of
> mind it brings.
> 
> We also have situations like the present poor performance of many of the
> network services we offer, including e-mail and database access.  These
> are annoying, but things "mostly work" anyway.  I can understand that we
> have a wide spectrum of stances on this among our member base: some
> prefer minimizing dues and are OK with slight flakiness, some are
> begging for a chance to pay a little extra for significantly better
> service.  I'm in the camp of being willing to pay several times more for
> a variety of different sorts of improvements to service.
> 
> "As we speak," there is a thread going on hcoop-help, where a member
> wants to run a Django web site.  The easiest way to get that going is
> with FastCGI or a similar scheme, but we don't have support for that.
> We currently only have one official "admin," as the rest have resigned
> over the last few months.  New functionality gets implemented when
> someone who has been granted root access thinks it will be fun.  Many
> members, I'm sure, would love to be able to throw money at us and get
> things done, but we just don't have the social infrastructure to support
> that kind of thing.
> 
> Another great example of this kind of problem is the idea of a
> non-AFS'd, normal UNIX machine that we would provide for the use of
> members who don't want to learn to deal with Kerberos, et al., just to
> run simple services.  This would take a significant amount of effort,
> but it could still be planned and executed in a week by a half-time
> admin, I claim.  We've been batting the idea around for more than a year
> with zero progress.  There are many other extensions to our offerings
> that I know would be seriously valuable to current members and would be
> seriously enticing to prospective members.  It's a question of what
> price each member wants to place on that kind of benefit.
> 
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