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

[Adam Chlipala]

Chris Fallin wrote:
> What are the estimated costs for paid staff?

Beats me.  I would like to start some serious investigations into these 
sorts of figures.  This list thread is a precursor to figuring out 
exactly what we ought to investigate.

> Do we intend to hire the
> equivalent of a full-time employee or only part of one?

I don't we need more than one half-time person (or multiple people 
adding up to that level of coverage), with the exception of emergency 
response.  Ideally, we'd have someone on call at any particular time, 
and hopefully we'd have few enough disasters that people would accept 
reasonably low pay for such positions.

> Do we have
> room in the budget and, if not, by how much would dues have to
> increase to cover the gap?
>   

We have negative room in the budget for new expenses, so this would 
definitely mean significant dues increases.

> If the dues increase, I am opposed to this: the attraction of HCoop
> (for me, at least) is that it is cheap because we pool our resources
> and have little overhead. It seems to me right now that it would be
> very hard to pay for an employee with the scale and budget at which we
> operate. I'd love to be proved wrong, though.
>   

HCoop will always remain cheap insofar as cheapness comes from pooling 
resources.  However, some of our "low overhead" is phantasmal, since it 
comes from heroic donations of time by volunteers.  Over the last few 
years, the size of the set of people willing to volunteer has been 
decreasing steadily (even as the member base has grown significantly), 
and the enthusiasm and time commitment of those who remain has also been 
decreasing.

The impact of this has been clear in our inability to implement any 
improvements to services, period, even to get up to basic levels that 
half of the members could get going in new machines in their basements 
in a day.  We've been lucky in our lack of serious data/hardware 
disasters, but the inadequacy of our staffing could definitely be 
revealed very clearly by such an occurrence.  Like I said in my last 
reply (to Michael Potter), I suggest that you may not be realizing how 
little you're getting now for your $5/mo..

I recognize that members have different price sensitivities.  
Unfortunately for those of you who are very price sensitive, you depend 
on the volunteered time of others who tend to be disproportionately 
price-insensitive and demanding of their hosting providers.  Anyone who 
can do the kinds of admin things that happen at HCoop can be doing 
pretty well for himself monetarily in the commercial IT world, so such 
people tend to be quite willing to fork over extra dollars for better 
service.  Maybe HCoop should split into two separate organizations based 
on price sensitivity, but, ironically, I believe that all or almost all 
of the qualified volunteer admins would choose the more expensive side 
of the fork, leaving the pie-in-the-sky, low-price contingent with no 
one left to keep supplying the magic that keeps prices low.

I use HCoop for a broad slice of all of my data storage and computing 
needs.  I'm willing to pay for reliability.  I'm also embarrassed by the 
low quality of our service ATM.  These factors combine to leave me 
pretty sure that, by a year from now, I won't be involved with any HCoop 
that doesn't have paid staff and charge significantly higher dues than 
we do now.