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

[Clinton Ebadi]

Michael Potter <mpotter at hcoop.net> writes:

> 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 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). 
> Also, I think paid staff will involve a rate increase, and I personally 
> don't want to pay extra for that.

Don't worry, paid staff is *not* the party line; it may seem that way,
but it is mostly because most of the coop has remained silent on the
issue--it's easy to get the impression that everyone supports paid staff
when no one pipes up to oppose Adam.

We do, however, have a serious problem--it is nice to believe that we
can get by without any paid stuff, but this belief is very clearly *not*
in line with reality anymore. We have *one* official volunteer admin
supporting close to 200 users now! 

Just wishing that things will work out is not enough--we need at least
two members to volunteer as sysadmins who can dedicate enough time (at
least for the next few months) to get hopper configured as our MTA/imap
server, rebuild our firewall/port management tools, get user limits back
in place, finally build a web interface to configure domtool, figure out
*why* imapd and apache go out to lunch regularly, etc. A large number of
tasks that we wanted to have done *years* ago at this point have all
been put off, a few bandaids have been put into place to keep things
going, and *no one* is stepping up to volunteer.

So, what do we do? We can continue to believe in an unreality and allow
the hcoop infrastructure to degrade until it is unusable, a few people
can volunteer to bring reality back into line with the belief that we
can do everything with only volunteers, or we can pay someone to do
sysadmin work for us. The first /solution/ is unacceptable--so then,
what will it be? Either people volunteer their time /or/ their money; we
cannot maintain our current monthly rate without more volunteer time.

-- 
Jessie: but today i was a nerd
Jessie: i even read slashdot.