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Grex > Coop12 > #113: Cyberspace Communications finances for June 2002 |  |
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| 25 new of 271 responses total. |
mary
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response 50 of 271:
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Jul 3 22:50 UTC 2002 |
One of the reasons Grex isn't getting a lot of donations
at this time is that it doesn't *need* the money. One of
the most heated and lengthy discussions we've had over the last
year or two was how to invest the money we do have. So,
I'm not at all surprised donations are down. But I also believe
that if Grex needed money for a designated improvement, or because
of a major crash or breakdown, that money would be there without
a lot of dramatic fundraising effort.
My biggest concern about Grex's viability isn't money, it's staff. We
have a very small pool of people involved with the hardware and software
and, for lots of good reasons, the time they have available to work on
Grex seems to be shrinking. We could use a creative surge of time and
energy there but I'm not sure how to get from where we are to a new pool
of qualified volunteers with enthusiasm for upgrading things.
Sorry, Mark, no answers here. Just different concerns.
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danr
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response 51 of 271:
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Jul 3 23:16 UTC 2002 |
While everyone's opinion is valued, the way our bylaws read, it is the
membership that makes the decisions, either by voting in an appropriate
board or by calling for a membership vote. I'm honestly amazed that
those who aren't members seem to be making such a big deal of how much
our fixed costs are. This money is obviously not coming out of your
pockets, so why do you care so much?
I agree completely with Mary that we should be more concerned about
staff than about the current level of donations. That's why I like
Eric's comment about using extra funds to hire a staffer. That would be
a great use for that money and allow us to do things that we can't do
now.
How do we get there from here? Might I suggest meeting sometime to
discuss some ideas? Are we having a Grex anniversary potluck/barbecue?
We could do it then or retire to a local watering hole/coffee house
afterwards to talk about this.
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spooked
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response 52 of 271:
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Jul 4 00:34 UTC 2002 |
I don't think it's feasible to pay a volunteer staffer for work on the
next Grex. It defeats the purpose of voluntary (and trusted) work. How
much would you pay them? How would they be held accountable? Do you
have any idea how quickly the money base would shrivel? What would be the
implications for current and future staffers - will they only work when
there's cash for work return?
I'm willing to, im my limited time as a current voluntary staffer, to help
test OpenBSD out on an x86. By the way, a starting checklist of
activities (mandatory and desirable?) would help in our transition to the
next Grex. Since the full bootable ISO images are not available for
download, could the staff member currently in possesion of the OpenBSD
disks post them to me, please?
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rcurl
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response 53 of 271:
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Jul 4 02:03 UTC 2002 |
Grex is a nonprofit charitable organization. That it is all voluntary is
a consequence of its origin and small size. However many small nonprofit
voluntary organizations, if they grow, eventually reach a level where
paid staff is necessary to maintain functions. It is one of the biggest
and most difficult steps that initially small organizations take, but
it has been taken by thousands. It does not change the nonprofit charitable
nature of the organization, nor even the predominantly volunteer nature
of an organization: it just uses income to serve the purposes of the
organization in a different manner.
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ric
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response 54 of 271:
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Jul 4 02:26 UTC 2002 |
FWIW, I agree with pretty much everything Joe Saul is saying. Grex is loaded,
they could easily cut their expenses and still provide a similar or even
better level of service than they currently offer.
Like Joe, I would kick in money to Grex if I thought Grex needed it. I've
never donated to Grex before but I wouldn't want to see it go away. I donate
to M-Net when they have cash crunches over there (as I'm expecting them to
have one soon since weh aven't seen a financial report over there in many
months)
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spooked
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response 55 of 271:
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Jul 4 02:33 UTC 2002 |
I understand that, *BUT* you have no idea how much work srw, janc, mdw,
valerie, dang, STeve, and others provide for no (monetary) personal return
for Grex (and they've been doing it for years consistently on end)...
I think such people deserve remuneration before a one-off paid for
project. I don't think we're ready to start paying people yet. We'd need
a much greater +'ive balance sheet.
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jmsaul
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response 56 of 271:
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Jul 4 03:03 UTC 2002 |
Re #50: I suspect that your problems attracting volunteers may be aggravated
by how non-standard some aspects of Grex's environment are. But
I'm not a technical expert.
Re #51: I care because I'm being told I should kick in "my share," Dan.
I'm not going to do that unless I'm confident it will be spent
well, and that Grex actually needs it. As long as you have large
cash reserves and are doing things in an unnecessarily expensive
way -- or at least nobody's explained why it is necessary if it
is -- I'm not confident.
You can't expect potential donors to just say "okay" and open
their checkbooks if you haven't made a case for why you need the
money. Not if you want to expand your donor base, anyway. (Then
again, you may not want to bother given your reserves.)
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mcnally
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response 57 of 271:
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Jul 4 03:26 UTC 2002 |
Who's telling you you should kick in "your share"? I can virtually
guarantee they aren't speaking for either the staff or the Grex board.
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jep
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response 58 of 271:
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Jul 4 03:33 UTC 2002 |
If my observations are not too far off base, Grex's membership is
shrinking and so is it's active usership. If the current hardware
would never deteriorate, and all the costs were fixed, Grex could
survive forever on it's current level of donations and could field a
very usable system while cutting expenses significantly.
I don't know of any plans to expand the services available here. I
don't know of any *desire* to offer more disk space, different types of
systems, more Internet services, or really, to change anything at all
about the way Grex works. Especially anything basic. I think the Grex
populace wants a text-based BBS, and will tolerate a WWW interface to
it. It wants access to Unix. It can support those things forever, on
the current hardware and connection, or much cheaper, faster modern
replacements. (M-Net does so already, and Grex could, too.)
I'm completely unmoved by the suggestion we might someday hire a full-
time staffer when we have a static and shrinking system.
I'd be a lot more interested, I think, in seeing some need for more
money before I get too excited about raising or contributing more.
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steve
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response 59 of 271:
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Jul 4 03:33 UTC 2002 |
Some interesting comments on all this.
Mark is right I think, in that we should try to up our membership.
We're beyond being casual about attracting members; we're practically
phobic about it. Tooting our horn a little to attract more people
is not a bad idea at all.
There are those who say that text-based systems are dying. On
one hand, I can agree with that--how many systems are there on the
net today where one can telnet/ssh in? Not many. This does make us
a living fossil as Ken has said in the past. But it is also true
that Grex has remained pretty true to its mission over the years
and could likely continue on in its present fashion for quite some
time. We have web based conferencing software, and I think more
people take out accounts on Grex via the web interface than the
tty newuser these days, but I'll have to check on that.
Grex has been riding on a static state for a while now, thats
to the "obsolete" hardware it has. There are faster systems out for
our type of use, most notibly i386 stuff. Sadly, this equipment is
optimized for one thing: increased profit. This is a far cry from
that of our Sun-4/670 which was built for reliability. Rock solid
dependable reliability. Using our current combination of hardware
and software, we've had uptimes of three months on this platform.
That is impressive by ANY standard used today. Grex hasn't had a
successful root-level breakin that we know of in many years. This
is exactly what the Grex staff strived for, several years ago, and
we got it. We've become so solid that the hardware reports at
board meetings are really pretty boring. The trouble spots for us
are 1) our DSL line which goes wonky every once in a while, and 2)
our modei and terminal server. The core system that we use really
can't be beat. This is equipment that was truly engineered, and it
shows.
Obsolete is a relative term, and I don't think it much applies to
Grex. Given my hardware usage at work I can safely say that Sun
equipment is generally vastly superior to that of i386 stuff. It
usually boils down to money spent, and in an era of corporate PL
statements and market stratgy designed to get a bigger piece of the
pie, something gives, and sadly quality is the hit. I'm not saying
that good i386 hardware isn't out there--Dell makes fantastically
reliable stuff (I have machines with 1.5 year 100.0% uptimes runing
OpenBSD), but even my trusty Dell's aren't as good in some areas
such as power supply design.
Because of our hardware status, the Grex staff has had the
luxury of being able to do something its never done before: sit
back and just watch it run. Back in the Sun-2 days we were
tweaking the little thing prodding it along; the initial Sun-3
system was good, but the addition of the first 2G disk we bought
proved to be a big problem because of some hardware incompatibility
problems we had; the Sun-4 was wonderful for a while but then had
various hardware problems. The Sun-4/670 came along after more than
a year of work, and poof, reliable system. So reliable that it has
been the increasing level of software problems when we've added
packages that has pushed us towards thinking of a new platform.
Given that we're at the beginnings of working on a new system
for Grex we've got a lot of work to do, looking at the two best
choices for Grex, i386 and Sun equipment. I prefer Sun stuff,
personally, but we need to look at both and decide based on Grex's
needs more than personal desires. I will say however that there
is Sun equipment that just blows i386 equipment out of the water
in terms of speed. The Pentium may be the king of the hill in
terms of popularity, but it wears shoddy clothes.
So we need to work on bettering ourselves. Besides a faster
system, we can think of better net connectivity. Better dial-in
support, to the extent they are used is something else to consider.
Grex has never been in its current position before, of having
a nice cushion in the bank and ultra stable hardware. I disagree
with any notions that we have too much however, in that some
major disaster (like a fire in the Pumpkin) would require some
large amount of cash to get us back up, and frankly, even though
we have a loyal user base I'm glad to see that we have this
pile sitting there. I think it shows some financial prudence
and an ability to ride through bad economic bad times pretty well.
What Grex doesn't do, which Mark's numbers show is try to
attract a little attention to itself and ask for money. I'm not
eager to see brazen attempts to see shakedowns at /bin/login,
but a few reminders here and there, and occaisonal email is not
out of line, I don't think.
I am hoping that I will finally be able to be of more use to
Grex in the coming months. The last nine months have been an
amazing journey for me, and I am glad to say that I am starting
to feel really good again.
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steve
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response 60 of 271:
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Jul 4 03:35 UTC 2002 |
Joe, what things are u necessarily expensive, from your point of view?
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danr
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response 61 of 271:
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Jul 4 03:54 UTC 2002 |
We really do need to think of new 'services' to offer, to go along with
the new hardware. I've been talking about this for years. We need to
recapture some of the experimental nature that MNet had in its early
years. We have to figure out a way to let people do cool things on the
Web. That's what is going to attract new blood to Grex.
What are those new services? Well, we pretty much missed the first wave
of the blog explosion, but we could still possibly offer that kind of
thing. Also, I don't see any reason why users shouldn't have access to
software like PHP and MySQL here.
Frankly, if all Grex is going to be is a BBS system, then it will
continue to lose users and become even more irrelevant than it is now.
Is that what we want to happen? If it is, and it looks like there's so
much inertia here that it's doomed to go that way, then I'm outta here,
too.
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jep
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response 62 of 271:
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Jul 4 03:56 UTC 2002 |
STeve, your comments to some extent say "It's great to have a big
stash; if we had a bigger stash we could really do some great things".
How big of a stash? What difference would it make to me as a user?
I think what Grex needs is a dollar figure and list of benefits. "If
we get $10,000, we could get X and Y and Z and it would have the
following wonderful results." It is not a goal, for most of us, for
Grex to have $5000 or $10000 in the bank. I don't think that in itself
is worth anything at all to most of us. I think Grex needs some more
definite dreams. Given that, I think we can achieve some of those
dreams, discard some of them, and strive for whatever is left.
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steve
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response 63 of 271:
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Jul 4 04:16 UTC 2002 |
Well, goals aren't a bad idea. Rigid holding to them could be
bad, but in general striving towards a certain state of things
isn't bad. Before, we worked towards getting something that didn't
need constant attention. With some luck and lots more work we
will be there on the next platform.
As for the difference having a cash pile makes to a user (assuming
they bother to investigate things), money in the bank means a certain
amount of stability, such that people know that we aren't in a mode
where we have to scramble for our next months expenses. Now, you
could argue that we have too much money (I don't think so), but I
think its important to have a cushion. We're at the point now where
we could determine to make that smaller, which is an excellent point
to be.
I agree Dan, more software should be available. Right now, an
increasing number of packages are hard to install on SunOS. Poor
old op system is beginning to show its age. We'll have to look at
things on a case-by-case basis, but if we can do something, I think
we should.
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aruba
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response 64 of 271:
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Jul 4 04:31 UTC 2002 |
What are blogs?
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krj
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response 65 of 271:
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Jul 4 04:59 UTC 2002 |
"blog" is shorthand for "weblog," the hot new personal journalism
example on the Web. See http://www.potifos.com/polygon
for an example of the form.
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jmsaul
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response 66 of 271:
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Jul 4 13:05 UTC 2002 |
Re #57: Aruba is (see #24 and #48, though I'll admit he's only implying
I should pay my share, not outright telling me ;-).
Re #59: Translation: we have big cash reserves and our hardware is still
ultra-reliable, so the only reason we need money is in case the
Pumpkin burns down and so we can build a bigger reserve.
My read: you don't need the money. Your hardware fund is way
more than enough to replace the hardware you're using if something
happens to the Pumpkin, but I'd kick in to get you guys back up
from a disaster and so would everyone else responding to this item.
As Ric said, why should my money languish in your bank account in
the meantime?
Re #60: Steve, the Pumpkin, and the additional costs associated with it,
are unnecessarily expensive in my opinion as compared to using a
co-lo site. They're a luxury. If your donations cover them, you
can afford that luxury. If they don't, you can't, and I'm not
going to help you pay for luxuries.
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jmsaul
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response 67 of 271:
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Jul 4 13:07 UTC 2002 |
By the way, I don't think it's a bad thing for you guys to have cash reserves
-- I'm just not motivated to donate so you can make them bigger.
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scott
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response 68 of 271:
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Jul 4 13:10 UTC 2002 |
Some of more vocal people here (jmsaul especially) are reminding of how
richard/kerouac used to behave here: "Grex doesn't need my money, it needs
my opinions!".
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jmsaul
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response 69 of 271:
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Jul 4 13:20 UTC 2002 |
Is that your latest way of saying "if you don't donate money, we don't
care what you think," Scott?
If it is, may I politely suggest that you stick it where the sun (no pun
intended) doesn't shine, and let the adults get on with a serious
discussion about fundraising and goals?
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jep
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response 70 of 271:
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Jul 4 14:44 UTC 2002 |
I think Grex needs a cash reserve, too. I don't agree that the answer
to any question about how much we need is "we need more".
I don't think Joe deserves animosity for raising the question of "why
should I donate?" If Grex doesn't have answers to that question which
grab people, it's not going to get money from people. If we're not
getting donations, there are reasons for that. Maybe it'd be
worthwhile to address those reasons, come up with answers for them.
Just maybe that would be more valuable than Joe (or someone else)
sending in a $60 check, because if we can't do it, we're going to
decline and maybe disappear.
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jared
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response 71 of 271:
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Jul 4 14:47 UTC 2002 |
system uptime is quite relative. if you spend a lot of time
poking and prodding the kernel in interesting ways you tend
to not see it stay up very long. i've got a number of systems
that run on reasonable (PC) hardware and have good uptimes.
Grex does have one problem as far as the staff is concerned IMHO.
The localized hacks that have been put in place in sendmail (for example)
as well as other software that is installed here does make it
complicated to keep it updated. There are a number of things that
should be migrated to the latest software that has these features
built-in. Grex staff is primarily a core set of people that are either
'in' or 'trusted' from the time of the inception. If the organization
is to survive for many years to come one should weigh decisions on their
experience yet keep thinking long-term that STeve, Marcus, Janc and
others may not always be close or able to work on things.
I'm not saying inject the new kid on the block into the staff group, but
the way i've seen it stay very static during the time i've been
watching the system does make me wonder.
I have numerous other financial obligations other than grex but if I
found out grex needed something and I could help, i'd do what I can
to arrange things to assist.
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jp2
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response 72 of 271:
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Jul 4 15:12 UTC 2002 |
This response has been erased.
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keesan
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response 73 of 271:
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Jul 4 15:30 UTC 2002 |
Grex needs more skilled volunteer hours and you cannot buy those.
(Is there any chance of installing the newer modems in the foreseeable
future????).
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aruba
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response 74 of 271:
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Jul 4 15:57 UTC 2002 |
I sense a lot of jealousy from Joe Saul, and Rick Root, and maybe from
John Perry, over the fact that Grex has managed to be very financially
stable over the past 8 years, and accumulate some reserves, while M-Net
has been otherwise. It looks to me like a pack of wolves who follow a man
around until he stumbles, then pounce.
It's become clear that the way money has come in to the two systems has
become very different. M-Net seems to go through crisis after crisis, and
people send in money when things get bad. Boards resign en masse - people
aren't sure how the bills will be paid from month to month. I gotta
admit, though, a few years ago no one thought M-Net would survive this
long. So it's working, sort of.
But that doesn't mean it's the best system, or that it's what Grex should
strive for. I think we can do better, and we should strive for better.
And in fact, that kind of instability was a major reason why the Grex
founders left M-Net in the first place.
The primary reason to become a member of Grex is to help pay the regular
expenses that operating Grex incurs. There are two ways to decide what
you "should" do about anything:
1. Ask your mother, and
2. Ask yourself.
I'm not anyone's mother, so I won't be telling anyone else what they
should do. All I'm doing is asking people to ask themselves if the
benefits they get from the normal operation of Grex are worth something to
them. And if so, whether it's worth becoming a member to help pay for
them, and help make sure they are safe.
I'm glad people are asking about the future of Grex. There are lots of
questions to be asked. But for the most part, how Grex will expand in the
future is separate from the question of becoming a member. You become a
member because you want to support the daily operations of Grex, i.e.,
what Grex is doing *now*.
If you'd like to support Grex in moving to a new machine, a good way to do
it would be to donate money to the Infrastructure Fund, which is
designated for that purpose. Dues money goes to the General Fund, which,
in general, goes to pay the monthly bills.
I admit that paying the monthly bills isn't a very flashy cause, and as I
said, I'm no salesman. But it makes sense to me: I benefit from Grex, so
I help it to pay its bills. YMMV.
About colocation and cutting expenses in general. I depend on the staff
to tell the board what expenses we need. If the staff decides it makes
sense to be colocated, and/or the membership or the board votes for it,
then it'll happen, I guess. I kind of like having our own place, but if
it's a luxury we can't afford, then we'll have to do without it. However,
if there are a lot of benefits to it, then maybe we should keep it. I'll
have to defer to someone else to weigh the benefits.
I realize that colocation has worked out pretty well for M-Net, but I want
to remind everyone that becoming colocated was a choice made out of
desperation, because there wasn't enough money to do anything else.
(BTW I am not an M-Netter, so feel free to correct me on M-Net history; I
only know what I've heard second-hand.)
Finally, I want to say that I like Grex's model of having a lot of members
who have a stake in the community. I wish there were more, but I don't
wish for a situation where expenses were low but so were expectations and
commitment. I want our strength to come from breadth, not from our
tight organization or financial nimbleness.
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