Now that Grex is back up with an IDE drive, which will hopefully solve the
problem of it crashing frequently, it seems to be that the most critical area
of concern is finding a new ISP.  At the board meeting, Steve said that Grex's
current ISP, provide.net, is likely to go under within a few months.  Without
an ISP, there is no Grex.

It is my understanding that Tony Publiski, who goes by the username tonster,
has generously offered to host Grex in his basement, on an indefinite and
free-of-charge basis.  He has also offered to take on staff duties.

Can the board and staff use this item to discuss the issue, or at least keep
the userbase up-to-date on their plans?  I understand that the time of Grex's
volunteers is the scarcest resource it has at the moment.  However, finding
a new host is literally vital to the future of Grex.  Therefore, I hope that
the people in charge are able to keep the userbase informed.

60 responses total.

If staff does want to take me up on my offer, feel free to ask me for
details or whatnot.  I can also bring up a VM anytime to test installs
and such if that's desirable.

  
fine offer tonster ... w/o doubt this wiell be discussed at the next
satff meeting .. whihd was supposed to bae a couile days ago .. (ahem).
  
in fact, satgff emetings are open ... you omight wanna sign up
on posteorus to stay tuned in. ... in additoin to grex.
  

Er, just to be clear, staff meetings have never been open.  Those and the 
staff conference are the only exceptions to our open tradition.  The idea 
was staff needed to have a place to discuss security concerns.

Now, not saying that can't be changed, but keeping those two areas staff 
only has worked in the past.

it's similar on m-net, and it's a good thing. if there's interest in my
offer or in me being on staff, let me know.

  
i may be wwroing but the -conference- is strictly closed but
the ftf meetings were nominally open or closed depending on hte
circumstance ... 
  

Nope; staff meetings were (and are) invitation-only.

They shouldn't be though.  Why shouldn't any user who is interested in 
grex and wants to partake of the discussion be allowed to attend a 
staff meeting if they want?  I think that staff meetings should be 
announced as taking place and anyone who wishes to attend need only 
rsvp staff to be told the time and location.

As mentioned in regards to the Board meetings, staff meetings usually
include discussion of security matters and similar things.

You really have to routinely discuss "security matters" in private? 
What "similar things" are so confidential?  That seems overly cautious.

Only non-profit board need to be open to the public (except for certain closed
sessions). Committees (like "staff") are much less constrained. They usually
just conduct their business within themselves, though often open enough to
encourage member participation, as appropriate. 

Staff should realize that such a lack of openness is easily mistaken for
absence and members who see the system go down for an amount of time
with nobody explaining why or how are not going to continue lending support.

Quite right. Committees should also report on their activities at least at
every board meeting and the reports should be available to the members (apart
from necessarily confidential information). 

The staff used to report at every board meeting.  I doubt that has
changed.

Think of it like this.  I own some (now rather worthless) bank stock.  I
am invited to be at the yearly shareholders meeting and to vote for
members of the board of directors.  But it would be rediculous of me to
insist I be allowed into the IT department's planning session for
deploying a new generation of ATMs.

I also vote for my legislators, but I am shocked to find that I am not
allowed to sit in on the meetings of the oversight commitee for the
Central Intelligence Agency even though my senator is a member of that
commitee.

Prospective members of staff do get invited to staff meetings so I
wouldn't say they are exactly closed, but they are the next best thing
to it.  And that is as it should be.

umm.. after Enron and Fannie May, I'm sure it's a good idea to sit on 
the IT department's planning session, so to speak. A lot of people have 
been calling for more transparency in the way companies and governments 
are governed.

The real question to ask should be: how transparent can you get without 
sacrificing profitability in the long run (include cost to society -
global-warming, etc). 

A lot would depend on the nature of the business and what needs to be 
protected. You might not want the latest Stealth-bomber schematics to 
be part of the public domain, but a lot of routine work could be made 
public at great cost savings to the tax payer.

In Grex's case, it's a non-profit, so barring security/privacy concerns 
(accidentally airing the root password in public) there should be no 
reason not to permit a open staff conference. It certainly is doable 
since security through obscurity is a bad idea anyway. It's not like we 
are an ad agency that needs to guard against theft of creative effort. 
Mind you, in a truly advanced and enlightened society, you probably 
won't need to bother about guarding against theft of your latest 
Stealth-bomber and even that would be public-domain.

It just seems bizarre to me that staff insists on maintaining the
privacy of their work when it really is to their detriment to operate
like that. I don't think member support of staff is very high right now,
but that might be different if they saw the effort being made.

Re #16: In order of importance:
1. No functional board
2. Not enough users
3. More money, more volunteers, more users, more users

I really don't see current staff as being much of a problem right now. 
Steve might have taken a month? to get Grex back, but he did get Grex 
back for the New Year; so what have we/board accomplished in the last 
13 days? 

Right now, what Grex REALLY needs is a functioning board! Then lets get 
some policy for handling volunteers - some efficient mechanism for 
handling new users, updating the web-site, contributing code, setting 
up an Internet presence (YouTube, FaceBook, MySpace, Wiki, Flickr), 
more features (MySQL access, virtualHost: veek.cyberspace.org, bigger 
disk quotas).

The whole problem as I see it is that suggestions just seem to 
dissipate once it reaches the board.. perhaps I'm mistaken, which is 
why that video thing would be really useful! Right now, all I see is 
Steve patching the box and heaving and hoing.. but a lot of policy type 
stuff seems to be missing.. eg: the web-site could do with some minor 
fixes; I need input for the Grex wiki page (http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/User:Vivek.m1234/Myyyyyyyyyyyy_Cyberspace_Stuff) I don't know how 
to handle the Grex logo thing TownHall.png - copyright+wiki??; etc Most 
of this stuff requires board input??

Comparing grex staff to a bank's IT department is rather ridiculous, but
some of what you say is certainly true.  I doubt there's really that
much that's truly private or poses a risk if seen publicly involved in
the discussion.

re #14
 I also vote for my legislators, but I am shocked to find that I am not
 allowed to sit in on the meetings of the oversight commitee for the
 Central Intelligence Agency even though my senator is a member of that
 commitee.


What about the GAO and congressional constituents?  They listen to popular
opinion frequently.  Why wouldn't Grex want to spend funds according
to the membership?

I see no reason not to open up the staff meetings.  Then again, I've never
been invited to a staff meeting.  I'm not sure they're particularly useful.

Also, for the last few years, the staff conference has been almost dead.
Before that, it was more of a gossip session than anything else.  I would
go so far as to suggest restarting it and opening it up read-only (unless
you are on staff) so that people have visibility into what staff does.  It
would embarass folks to open up older generations of the conference, but
opening it up going forward would be good.

The security concern is not relevant; security issues haven't been discussed
there in years.  If they need to be, that's what email could be used for
(perhaps with a copy kept in a file on grex).

  
if the timing is right, you can particoipate as you did, by phn, with
the board meetigs.
  

I think the timing should be made right so that I can participate.

re #20 how would it embarass folks if older versions of the staff 
conference were opened as read-only?  Was the staff conference being 
used as a place to trade hurtful and malicious gossip about other 
users and say things about them that you wouldn't say if they could 
read it?  

In my opinion, yes and yes.

re #23
I think you've pretty much found the hot button.  Sure, there might be that
1 out of 20 security discussion but I'm betting the true fear is that
there was too much unprofessional bashing taking place.

Yup.

Open the archives!!

  
re 22 ... and i agree totally.  how many hours different are you from est?
  
btw, sned me an email with a phn number so i ca test out magicjack
here, from home, befoe we try a board meeting.
  

see this item is a perfect example of what is wrong with grex.  Read 
the title, " Where is Grex moving to when provide.net closes in a few 
months?" and then find any of the twenty eight responses that actually 
discusses that.  

I think it is becoming clear that Grex's board and staff have become 
entirely reluctant to make any real decisions.  Probably out of pure 
complacency and disinterest.  

Clearly the downtime grex has had due to the box being at a co-lo where 
nobody has the time to go over to it shows that things need to change. 
How many times does Grex have to be down days at a time simply because 
nobody has the time to go over to provide.net and reset it?  Grex's 
board needs to get off their asses and accept Tonster's very generous 
offer.   

If the inclination of Grex's board members is to not do anything and 
make no decisions, why are they serving in that capacity?  To put it on 
their resumes?  

I think we could move forward here without beating up our volunteers.  
Really I do.

I think that the beating up of the volunteers just makes things run even
slower

re #30,31 I disagree.  I think the fact that the board members are 
volunteers should in no way insulate them from user/member criticism.  
If you agreed to serve that is a contract between you and those that 
elected you, and you therefore have to accept whatever heat comes from 
doing or not doing the job, regardless of whether you are being paid 
for it.

I have served in volunteer positions, on campaigns and other such, and 
I have never thought that the fact that I was 'volunteering' gave me a 
free pass to be less responsible than those who were doing paid 
positions.     

I think having Tony on staff is a great idea.
 
I'm less enamored of the idea of having Tony as Grex's landlord.
Grex has always tried to stay in commercial space because there 
were some issues in Olde M-net Days about having the system in 
someone else's home.
 
Having a private individual host Grex in his or her home works 
great -- until it doesn't.  When it breaks, it breaks spectacularly.
 
Possible bad things:
1)  Law enforcement could decide to seize Grex.  Since it wouldn't be 
clear to them which computers were Grex and which were Tony's, they 
would find it easier to take everything.

2)  Access by other staff for hardware issues might conflict with 
family needs of the host: say there's a sick kid or something.
 
3)  The host and the rest of the Grex community could sour on each 
other.  (This is not meant as a dig at Tony, it could happen with 
anyone.)
 
4)  Not to be too morbid, but something could happen to the host --
unemployment, incapacitating illness, stuff like that.

Worst case - off-site backups installed on new hardware or hosting.  I 
think we could worry so much about all that could go wrong that we'd 
simply die from paralysis.

resp:32 Do you think that being very critical of volunteers makes other
people more likely or less likely to volunteer? If Grex had hundreds of
people who wanted to volunteer and only a very few volunteer slots,
there would be room for a lot of criticism. That isnt the case here. And
it is especially galling when the people who do the most complaining are
not people willing to do any work themselves. 

It is one thing to helpfully point out things that need to be done and
perhaps even suggest possible solutions. It is quite another to demand
someone else's unpaid time. It really bothered me when I was on the
board that no matter how much effort I put into things, there was always
someone bitching that not enough was being done and it was usually
someone who couldn't be bothered to do anything themselves. 

Note that in my scenario there should be no need for anyone to touch the
hardware grex is hosted on, any more than if grex were hosted as a
virtual machine at a commercial company would it have physical hardware.
 Unlike now, however, I could provide access to the machine it is hosted
on so that grex staff (all grex staff, or whoever staff appointed to
have access, and I would not be the sole person to give that access)
would be able to access the machine remotely as if they were sitting
right in front of it.  Power on the machine, power it off, get on
console, reboot, whatever.  

I do understand the hesitation due to m-net's beginnings, though I have
no intentions of doing anything like that.  As mary said, though, theres
always the option of offsite backups.  Staff can also take snapshots of
the VM and probably copy those offsite occasionally.  I've never
actually done that, but I'm certain it's possible.

As far as being critical of board and staff, I have to say that it's
coming to a point that something more harsh needed to be said.  The
conversation has sat stagnant for the past 3+ months.  Offers and
suggestions have been made since grex was down late last year with
little or no mention by most of the board and staff.  At some point the
clock is going to wind down on provide.net's service and they're going
to call someone and say 'hey, we've been telling you for months that our
service is shutting down.  You need to be out by Friday.' and noone is
going to know what to do because noone will discuss it.

FWIW, it is very different when criticism comes from someone who is
obviously willing to do things. It is also fine to point out things
which need to be done which is a much different thing from demanding
that someone else do those things. 

The real problem with Grex is a leadership void though and nagging isnt
going to solve that problem unfortunately. It has been my experience
that harsh criticisms can sometimes get people to do things in the short
term but in the long run, those harsh criticisms result in things like a
board of directors who dont log on, dont participate in online
discussions, don't attend board meetings and so on. It sucks but that is
how I see it.

Maybe it is too late for Grex. Maybe there really is no one willing to
step up enough to save it. 

(if I cared enough, which I don't, I would make sure that board meetings
happened by organizing them and calling board members to remind them to
show up. Then I would insist that Grex be moved to Tony's house and I
would do everything I could do to facilitate that. That might include
calling staff people and encouraging them to participate by doing things
to make it fun for them.) 

 

I should also make clear that i'm not encouraging berating volunteers. 
I've been volunteering for m-net long enough to know that what slynne
says is correct, too much of it happens.  however, after months of
getting no response at some point you've got to get more firm.  Whether
it's to my server or finding another solution, the problem isn't going
away, time is running out, and a decision must be made.

I think when/if Tonster takes the box, that should also be the time 
that Grex formally stops offering email.  There is really no reason for 
Grex to be offering email these days, there are only eighteen zillions 
places where you can get free email from places that can provide better 
services than Grex.  There was a time years ago when Grex offering free 
email was a valuable service.  Not anymore.  Besides I think that 
without the email, it might discourage trolls from bothering to come 
here.

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss