There have been a couple of threads on the list this week about the creation of individual teams to manage some FSFE services and the type of service that the system-hackers are offering to provide.
One of the bigger issues associated with all this is the question of whether FSFE's IT model can be replicated by other organizations (including non-profits) of similar size.
The default strategy for many organizations today seems to start with a Facebook group and graduate to Google Apps, possibly outsourcing a web site where money is spent on appearance and dodgy SEO services rather than development of any real functionality.
This brings me to a few questions:
- should it be a priority for FSFE's IT strategy to be easily replicated, so that we can say to other organizations that they can follow the FSFE sysadmin wiki and they will be up and running in a few hours?
- are there other small non-profit organizations that already demonstrate best practice for volunteer-run IT with free software and should we build a list of them? For example, is FSF's or Debian's strategy considered suitable for other organizations to replicate?
- going beyond the scope of Linux distributions like Debian, there are solutions like ClearOS[1] that aim to provide a turn-key office/small business solution, is anybody maintaining a list of these and would it be more productive for FSFE to move onto something like that and individual volunteers (such as the blog team) would contribute to that project?
Regards,
Daniel
- are there other small non-profit organizations that already
demonstrate best practice for volunteer-run IT with free software and should we build a list of them? For example, is FSF's or Debian's strategy considered suitable for other organizations to replicate?
That is exactly the reasoning for fsf using civicrm [1]. Other not-for-profits or charities also use it. They also did a crowdfunding for mediagoblin a couple of times.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CiviCRM
-- -- Andres (he/him/his) Ham United Group Richmond Makerlabs
On Fri, May 20, 2016 at 06:08:12PM +0100, amunizp wrote:
That is exactly the reasoning for fsf using civicrm [1]. Other not-for-profits or charities also use it. They also did a crowdfunding for mediagoblin a couple of times.
Hold on for or moment.
We just handed administration of our _Wordpress_ installation over to a volunteer team, because we could not keep up with the maintenance. This is certainly not the time to discuss deployment of another high maintenance software product.
IT infrastructure includes Mail routing, DNS, server deployment, virtualisation, documentation, just to name a few. We were able to hand over administration of the blogs, because we put a great level of trust into Florian and his team. Maintaining this service, even on a distinct VServer, requires access to the login database, mail domains, SSL ceritificates and possibly more. If we want to encourage Fellows to run Services in the name of FSFE, we need to find a strategie for dividing ressources and permissions accordingly. Being able to distinguish only between absolutely trusted access and no access at all, puts us system-hackers in a bottle-neck position regarding any effort of Fellows to help us out on the technical site.
If we _were_ in a position to run Drupal/CiviCRM, would we then replace our mailinglists with it? Would we let a single service replace our wiki, our website, our user database, blogs, file services? Having all this in one system, without possible division of roles for anyone who maintains the web server behind it is, I think, quite the opposite of what we are aiming at. Would we not go the whole way to make said services subject to CiviCRM, then would the remaining features aid us in handling our technical infrastructure?
To put this in context with Daniels questions:
I do not put a priority on FSFEs infrastructure being easy to replicate by other organisations. However I do care that it can be easily understood by people joining any maintenance team. While an all-in-one service like CiviCRM might serve the former purpose, it is detrimental to the latter. Components are easy to understand and to maintain when they interface little with other components, when they use well known standards where they do interface (i.e. in contrast to shared database tables and internal APIs), and when they are deployed with little local modifications. Admittedly, running multiple services requires more set up work than running one service. Hence it is harder to replicate. This cost is set off by better being able to share maintenance work, by better being able to change parts of the setup, and by easyer maintenance through lack of interdependencies. The initial cost of setup pays out fast and massively.
I could not find material that gives explicit numbers or examples of organisations, that are small, non-profit, and use a volunteer-run CiviCRM inside volunteer-run infrastructure. To me it is unclear from the website, to what degree organisations use CiviCRM only as a hosted service. Because of CiviCRMs close relation to core tasks like fund raising and member listing, I imagine it hard to run as volunteer service, or to have modules on top of it maintained by persons who are not core members of the organisation running it.
On 23/05/16 16:17, Paul Hänsch wrote:
On Fri, May 20, 2016 at 06:08:12PM +0100, amunizp wrote:
That is exactly the reasoning for fsf using civicrm [1]. Other not-for-profits or charities also use it. They also did a crowdfunding for mediagoblin a couple of times.
Hold on for or moment.
We just handed administration of our _Wordpress_ installation over to a volunteer team, because we could not keep up with the maintenance. This is certainly not the time to discuss deployment of another high maintenance software product.
IT infrastructure includes Mail routing, DNS, server deployment, virtualisation, documentation, just to name a few. We were able to hand over administration of the blogs, because we put a great level of trust into Florian and his team. Maintaining this service, even on a distinct VServer, requires access to the login database, mail domains, SSL ceritificates and possibly more. If we want to encourage Fellows to run Services in the name of FSFE, we need to find a strategie for dividing ressources and permissions accordingly. Being able to distinguish only between absolutely trusted access and no access at all, puts us system-hackers in a bottle-neck position regarding any effort of Fellows to help us out on the technical site.
If we _were_ in a position to run Drupal/CiviCRM, would we then replace our mailinglists with it? Would we let a single service replace our wiki, our website, our user database, blogs, file services? Having all this in one system, without possible division of roles for anyone who maintains the web server behind it is, I think, quite the opposite of what we are aiming at. Would we not go the whole way to make said services subject to CiviCRM, then would the remaining features aid us in handling our technical infrastructure?
To put this in context with Daniels questions:
I do not put a priority on FSFEs infrastructure being easy to replicate by other organisations.
How do other people feel about that point?
FSFE's "About" page says the organization's mission is to empower users. Personally, I feel that setting an example that other organizations can replicate will help achieve that goal and doing things that other people can easily copy is a powerful form of leadership.
However I do care that it can be easily understood by people joining any maintenance team. While an all-in-one service like CiviCRM might serve the former purpose, it is detrimental to the latter. Components are easy to understand and to maintain when they interface little with other components, when they use well known standards where they do interface (i.e. in contrast to shared database tables and internal APIs), and when they are deployed with little local modifications. Admittedly, running multiple services requires more set up work than running one service. Hence it is harder to replicate. This cost is set off by better being able to share maintenance work, by better being able to change parts of the setup, and by easyer maintenance through lack of interdependencies. The initial cost of setup pays out fast and massively.
I could not find material that gives explicit numbers or examples of organisations, that are small, non-profit, and use a volunteer-run CiviCRM inside volunteer-run infrastructure. To me it is unclear from the website, to what degree organisations use CiviCRM only as a hosted service. Because of CiviCRMs close relation to core tasks like fund raising and member listing, I imagine it hard to run as volunteer service, or to have modules on top of it maintained by persons who are not core members of the organisation running it.
I notice you only commented on CiviCRM, how do you feel about the other solutions I mentioned, ClearOS and TurnKey Linux?
I'm not suggesting that any of these is a silver bullet, nonetheless, if people contribute effort to making bespoke solutions for FSFE then their work will only benefit FSFE. If they are willing to contribute their effort to a large project (any of those mentioned) then their work will be useful to other organizations who want to run free software too.
Regards,
Daniel
Hi Daniel,
Thank you for your suggestions. I appreciate your enthusiasm and I will certainly keep your suggestions in mind when implementing anything.
Daniel Pocock daniel@pocock.pro writes:
How do other people feel about that point?
FSFE's "About" page says the organization's mission is to empower users. Personally, I feel that setting an example that other organizations can replicate will help achieve that goal and doing things that other people can easily copy is a powerful form of leadership.
Well, the statement is a political statement. That does not mean, the FSFE will enable everyone personally by providing software to them, but rather that the FSFE wants to get to the point where using Free Software is the norm. Part of that strategy can be what you mentioned, but the FSFE is not a technical organization; it is a political and educational organization about technology.
I think many of your suggestions make sense and we (the blog hackers) and probably others would love to implement some of them. However, the problem is that your suggestions mean a major change from how things are currently done. Your suggestions also mean major work to even just achieve these kinds of goals. We do not have the manpower to do that right now and the best thing we can do is look at a system and take small steps to making it more maintainable. Defining service plans and deciding which database we want to use or even changing the whole infrastrucure setup before we even know what is feasible, is not a good idea.
And to be completely honest here, another reason why your suggestions are sometimes a bit problematic is that you are suggesting other people implement them. If they were small or easily implemented changes, that would be fine, but if someone asks for major changes to the infrastructure, they should be prepared to implement those changes. That does not mean you shouldn't make suggestions, but you keep on pushing them after people tell you why they don't think your suggestions are feasible right now and I invited you to the blog team, but you still only make more suggestions here on this list. I understand you're probably busy, but you're coming off a little bit like telling other people how to do their jobs (not because of one suggestion, but because you keep pushing them).
That being said, I really do appreciate your suggestions and wheneve we make any decisions, I will think about what you wrote here and see if any of it is applicable.
Happy hacking! Florian
On 24/05/16 07:15, Florian Snow wrote:
Hi Daniel,
Thank you for your suggestions. I appreciate your enthusiasm and I will certainly keep your suggestions in mind when implementing anything.
Daniel Pocock daniel@pocock.pro writes:
How do other people feel about that point?
FSFE's "About" page says the organization's mission is to empower users. Personally, I feel that setting an example that other organizations can replicate will help achieve that goal and doing things that other people can easily copy is a powerful form of leadership.
Well, the statement is a political statement. That does not mean, the FSFE will enable everyone personally by providing software to them, but rather that the FSFE wants to get to the point where using Free Software is the norm. Part of that strategy can be what you mentioned, but the FSFE is not a technical organization; it is a political and educational organization about technology.
I think many of your suggestions make sense and we (the blog hackers) and probably others would love to implement some of them. However, the problem is that your suggestions mean a major change from how things are currently done. Your suggestions also mean major work to even just achieve these kinds of goals. We do not have the manpower to do that right now and the best thing we can do is look at a system and take small steps to making it more maintainable. Defining service plans and deciding which database we want to use or even changing the whole infrastrucure setup before we even know what is feasible, is not a good idea.
And to be completely honest here, another reason why your suggestions are sometimes a bit problematic is that you are suggesting other people implement them. If they were small or easily implemented changes, that
That is not the case at all and I'm sorry if my style of communication gave that impression.
Every day there is some contribution I make to improving free software, sometimes these are things that could be used directly by the system-hackers or other individual teams, sometimes they are things that are more abstract.
I'm not suggesting that the system-hackers must immediately drop everything else and switch to one of these ready-to-run Linux systems, but the relevance of these systems for small organizations is definitely worthy of discussion.
Packaging something in Debian or Fedora is usually a prerequisite for having something in one of these ready-to-run systems, so it is quite possible that things might evolve in phases:
a) the blog team decides you are keen to support 2 or 3 Wordpress plugins or you decide on a particular static hosting solution with a web-based editing tool for pages stored in Git. Maybe you try them on the system for a few weeks or months without packaging them.
b) volunteers (possibly from within the team or other FSFE members) help package those things as .deb files and maybe they are kept in a local APT repository for FSFE servers
c) those packages are submitted at mentors.debian.net and eventually uploaded into Debian and other organizations can use them too (and also contribute to them, blog about using them, etc)
d) those packages become available in one of those ready-to-run solutions mentioned already, like TurnKey Linux or ClearOS
e) at some point, the system-hackers decide they may want to use the packaged version of the software as it is no longer necessary to keep a version in the local APT repository
f) and maybe they reach a point where they feel one of these ready-to-run solutions meets their needs too
So, it starts off with the blog team evaluating and choosing things, but with the long term view that those things can be supported as part of a distribution.
Other people, including myself, may get involved in any of those steps without necessarily being involved at every step.
Regards,
Daniel
Hi Daniel,
Daniel Pocock daniel@pocock.pro writes:
Every day there is some contribution I make to improving free software, sometimes these are things that could be used directly by the system-hackers or other individual teams, sometimes they are things that are more abstract.
I am aware that you are very active in the Free Software world and I am very happy about it. I did not mean to imply otherwise, in case I sounded that way.
I'm not suggesting that the system-hackers must immediately drop everything else and switch to one of these ready-to-run Linux systems, but the relevance of these systems for small organizations is definitely worthy of discussion.
I understand, but that discussion needs to take place within the system hackers.
For the blog team, I can also tell you what the phases will roughly be: 1. Migrating the blog to a current version of Wordpress with a few plugins/themes as possible. Otherwise, nothing should change here. 2. Finding a more long-term solution. This can be a static setup where maintenance is easy because we could keep the backend only accessible by sustaining members. It could also involve packaging software for Debian. That is something we will discuss and where we will take your suggestions into consideration. But this cannot happen yet because the migration is our top priority.
Happy hacking! Florian
On 20/05/16 18:49, Daniel Pocock wrote:
There have been a couple of threads on the list this week about the creation of individual teams to manage some FSFE services and the type of service that the system-hackers are offering to provide.
One of the bigger issues associated with all this is the question of whether FSFE's IT model can be replicated by other organizations (including non-profits) of similar size.
The default strategy for many organizations today seems to start with a Facebook group and graduate to Google Apps, possibly outsourcing a web site where money is spent on appearance and dodgy SEO services rather than development of any real functionality.
This brings me to a few questions:
- should it be a priority for FSFE's IT strategy to be easily
replicated, so that we can say to other organizations that they can follow the FSFE sysadmin wiki and they will be up and running in a few hours?
- are there other small non-profit organizations that already
demonstrate best practice for volunteer-run IT with free software and should we build a list of them? For example, is FSF's or Debian's strategy considered suitable for other organizations to replicate?
- going beyond the scope of Linux distributions like Debian, there are
solutions like ClearOS[1] that aim to provide a turn-key office/small business solution, is anybody maintaining a list of these and would it be more productive for FSFE to move onto something like that and individual volunteers (such as the blog team) would contribute to that project?
Another one in this category is Turnkey Linux, based on Debian jessie https://www.turnkeylinux.org/