Grex's Long-Term Plan

Apr 28 05:27 UTC 1999

Last month we talked about having a "Plan the Budget Meeting".  This
didn't materialize because of a lack of any ideas posted on-line.

The board feels that we need to develop a longer range plan before we
can do any sensible shorter range planning.  Long range issues include:

 * Do we stick with a single server, or go toward distributed servers?
   Staying with a single server has the problem that we'd have to
   transition away from SunOS to some other operating system (Linux or
   Solaris or something), because there aren't many SunOS machines that
   are faster than our current one.  Going to distributed servers
   may require various new software like Kerberos, AFS, client/server
   versions of Picospan, Backtalk, and party, and so forth.  Either
   way, there is a lot of software development needed, and it will
   likely take more than a year to get done, so we need an advance plan.
 
 * Do we want to try change our emphasis?  A suggestion was made to
   split Grex into two systems, a conferencing/party system, and an
   E-mail.  Each would have separate telnet queues.  Conferencing
   would perhaps be available from the E-mail system, but E-mail would
   not be available from the conferencing system.  This would limit
   the growth of the E-mail service, without impinging on the growth
   of the growth of the on-line community.  Is this a good idea?

 * Do we want Grex to continue to grow at all?  If not, how do we
   stop it from growing?

We need to start some discussion aimed at producing (one or more) plans
for Grex's future development.  This item is meant as a starting point
for that.  The board has also tentatively scheduled a face-to-face
"Plan the Future" meeting on Sunday May 23 at the home of Mark Conger.
This meeting will be open to the public.

Whatever plans are created should should probably be put to a membership
vote.